Youth’s everyday environmental citizenship: An analytical framework for studying interpretive agency

Abstract

When youth agency and climate change are understood in the context of Politics, they do not reflect young people’s everyday realities and their youthful engagement with climate change. Building on the performative understanding of citizenship, in this theoretical piece, I suggest a broader framing of youthful political agency and participation in the context of climate change and consumerism by referring to four basic lived political positionings: ‘victim’, ‘voter’, ‘rejecter’ and ‘interpreter’. I further argue that young people perform their interpretive agency by adopting everyday activism and green lifestyles while challenging adult-led conceptualisations of environmental ideologies.