The formal transnational networks of the youth climate movement

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges faced by humanity. However, the current global politics struggle to implement collective solutions. In this context, young people have recently entered the international political arena. Greta Thunberg, a young woman, attracted massive attention on climate change at UN conferences. Furthermore, many youth organizations are active both in formal and informal politics. Youth actors are increasingly intervening in the Conferences of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) through various channels, including YOUNGO (official youth constituencies of the UNFCCC), youth delegates, or the Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change. Youth environmental organizations such as Nature and Youth (Norway) and Young Energy Specialists and Development Cooperation (Netherlands) have attended the UNFCCC COPs since its very first meeting in 1995. Also, major environmental non-governmental organizations are opening youth branches. While youth representation is evolving with unprecedented speed in global climate politics, there is no comprehensive scientific knowledge of their profiles and networks at the transnational level. Recently, there has been an increasing number of studies on informal youth actions, especially through the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement, but very few deal with the broader scope of youth formal participation in international climate change politics. This paper aims to fill this gap. As the first step of a four-year project on youth in earth politics, the paper presents the results of the first systematic inventory of youth actors in the UNFCCC between 1995-2021. This database enables discussion of youth actors’ presence in different negotiation processes over time and their institutionalization as well as socialization in the international political game. The social network of the youth actors on the database will be analyzed with R and Gephi. In addition, the discourses used by the prominent actors identified in the social network analysis will be analyzed through their official statements collected from online searches. Are there ties among youth actors who formally attend the climate negotiations, and what are the ties? Are they linked to informal climate movements? What kind of discourses are shared by youth actors actively involved in formal types of political actions (formal participation) at the transnational level? What are the similarities and differences of the networks of the formal youth climate movement compared to other social movements? By answering those questions, the paper will shed light on the formal political engagement of youth actors at the international level on climate change issues.