Framing climate justice at the youth pre-COP

Youth activism for the climate has attracted increasing attention in recent years. The emergence of Fridays For Future and Extinction Rebellion between 2018 and 2019 has brought to the fore a new generation of activists and provided the issue of climate change with unprecedented saliency and visibility in the public sphere. Nevertheless, student climate strikes are far from being the first occurrence of mass mobilisation on climate change. Rather, they are contributing in a long trajectory of climate justice mobilisation, rooted in different strands of environmentalism, as well as in the climatisation of global justice struggles. Research on social movements have analysed different stages of this developments, as well as assessing the breaks and continuities in this pathway. Still, there is no systematic comparison between student climate strikes and “traditional” climate justice marches. Our paper aims to fill this gap in the literature, focusing on the framing of climate change in the protest activities that took place in Milan, Italy, in October 2021, during the Youth Pre-COP 26 of the UNFCCC: a student climate strike was organised by FFF, a “traditional” climate justice march by a wide coalition of actors, and both a climate camp and an eco-social forum acted as countersummits. The paper, relying on protest surveys and qualitative interviews, discusses the differences, similarities and spaces for convergence between activists in these different forums, focusing on the framing of climate change, and in particular on the different meanings attached to the “climate justice” concept. The survey data shows that, even if “system change” was the vastly predominant prognostic frame in both demonstrations, it was much more so in the “traditional” climate justice march than in the student climate strike. We investigate these analogies and differences through the analysis of qualitative interviews.