Youth and the (de-)politisation of discourses on green issues: from eco-civism to eco-activism.

The political participation of young people is often problematised (Farthing 2010; Furlong and Cartmel 2012). Following Greta Thunberg’s message in August 2018, the youth has gathered around the globe to demand more ambitious measures from our leaders in order to be in line with the Paris Agreement (De Wever Van der Heyden, Neubauer, & van der Heyden, K., 2020). The School Strike movement has challenged the widespread concern about youth political apathy (Grasso, 2016; Sloam, 2016) and supports the thesis according to which young people have unconventional modes of political participation (Norris 2003; Pleyers, 2016; Boulianne, Lalancette, & Ilkiw, 2020; Kitanova, 2020). Drawing on the Essex School of discourse analysis and more specifically on the work of Mouffe (2010 ; 2019), we are exploring the conditions of repoliticisation from the viewpoint of the post-foundational theories. This approach provides a critical theoretical account of the context of political crisis in which this research is situated. Explicitly, it states that the current emergence of the “populist moment” (Mouffe, 2019) in an increasingly politicised, even “polarising” world (Kenis, 2021) is an opportunity to move away from the “post-political” and even “post-democratic” (Mouffe, 2019) condition that has followed thirty years of neoliberalism. It is in this context that we aim to explore the forms of “green” participation of the youth as potentially challenging the neo-liberal capitalist hegemony. However it is substantial to note that the mere existence of a multiplicity of actors and actresses articulated around the environmental and climate issues doesn’t automatically mean that it is politicised. To reconfigure and repoliticise a public issue, it is necessary to be in a situation with a high degree of “social ventilation” (Comby, 2015). We argue that the massive mobilisation of the youth gathers the conditions to produce a potential reconfiguration of the “green” issues. We ask ourselves the following twofold question: How are the green issues constructed by the actors and actresses of “green” participation and what is their (in)visibility in the mainstream media? Comparative analysis of the media discourses of eco-civists and eco-activists in French-speaking Belgium. Concretely, we have carried out an exploratory discourse analysis situated between the summer of 2019 and the arrival of the pandemic. We develop a multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the discourses of Youth For Climate Belgium (eco-activists) and The Lemon Spoon (eco-civists) and their respective (in-)visibility within the mainstream media through the lens of (de-)politicisation. We shall show that although both categories can be categorised as “eco-citizens”, their construction of the “green” issues differ in many ways and camouflaging these differences is depoliticising as such. Our study sheds the light on the discursive fault lines of the two groups and is thus repoliticising the debate on “green” issues in an attempt to subvert the post-political pitfall of the neo-liberal hegemony.