Youth, efficacy and urban environmental engagement: putting youth voice at the centre of Nottingham’s Carbon Neutral 2028 vision

The increasing recognition that the world is facing a climate emergency is never far from news headlines and has prompted a surge in environmental activism that has spread globally (Fisher 2019; Wahlström et al. 2019). Responding to these protests, many national governments have been eager to engage with activists to then lay down targets to reduce carbon emissions. Additionally, such protests have also transformed international conversations at important United Nations climate negotiations in the run-up to the 2021 COP26 Climate Conference (Henn, Sloam and Nunes 2021). Although such citizen/elite engagement is evident at national and international levels, we know considerably less about local level interactions between (non-activist) citizens and powerholders concerning the climate emergency. This paper addresses this issue and considers young people’s engagement with, and prioritisation of, environmental issues in their communities. The research was based on a project conducted in the city of Nottingham which is an interesting case study as it has a publicly declared ambition to become the UK’s first carbon neutral city by 2028 (https://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/cn2028). Co-production methods were used to design a series of 11 deliberative focus groups with 35 young people aged 15-27, with the groups facilitated by young community-based co-researchers. The findings suggest that young people were typically very concerned about environmental issues yet lacked internal efficacy, feeling relatively uninformed about such matters. They also lacked external efficacy, investing little trust in national governments and global institutions in terms of their motivations, plans and capacities for tackling the climate crisis. Instead, they felt that local-level initiatives and individual actions offered a possible pathway to address climate change; however, there was considerable uncertainty as to the effectiveness of collective responses such as climate strikes and protests.