Everyday youth climate politics and performances of climate citizenship in Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract

Young people around the world are creating their own spaces, strategies, and politics for climate action. In this article we explore the everyday informal politics of climate activism by youth from Aotearoa New Zealand's largest city (Auckland). We examine how young people, frustrated by the lack of global and domestic political inertia, are operationalizing their concerns about climate change into actions in their daily lives directed at mitigating their greenhouse gas emissions. Through a relational qualitative approach, we document the contradictory standing of youth, specifically as agentic actors and environmental citizens, who are aware of and seeking climate action through multiple modes of action including protesting, eco-consuming, influencing others, and eco-caring work. Our youth participants reported how their participation in various forms of climate activism helped to reduce their eco-anxiety and made them more hopeful about their collective abilities to address climate change. Our participants highlighted a hopeful view that their small-scale individual actions will collectively add up to large-scale changes at a systemic level. However, they were highly aware of and critical of state and corporate actors attempts to shift responsibility for taking actions to mitigate climate change onto individuals. Rather than situating themselves solely as eco-consumers engaging in eco-friendly purchasing practices, our youth participants narrated their sometimes contradictory climate actions (protesting, buy-cotting or boycotting, changing how they used goods, and services) as acts of resistance against the socio-economic status quo (high-carbon, neoliberal, and capitalist) that could act as trigger points for wider change. In this article we identify the various methods by which young people are participating in daily climate politics and demonstrating their agency, which are evident in their diverse pro-environmental-oriented and climate mitigation actions; all of which is evidence of how youth are seeking to be good climate citizens.