Learning on the move: politicisation and efficacy in climate strikes

In 2018, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg began a school strike that quickly spread across the globe. In a fre months, by 2019 Fridays for Future (FFF) climate strikes had become the largest climate protests in world history. The paper focuses on the learning processes that have taken place within FFF and on their potential for climate activism and beyond. It draws on unique protest survey data collected on FFF events in 23 European cities in in two rounds of fieldwork during the March 2019 and September 2019 FFF global climate strikes (N= 4,699). the extant literature shows that early participation in protest events is a form of political socialisation and that learning processes take place within social movements. In this paper we aim to disentangle this notion and root it into the experience of climate activism. What do participants learn? Are learning processes about the contents of the protest or about the act of protesting? Does participation in climate strikes favour the development of ideological stances closer to the movement’ core discourse, or does it favour the belief into the idea the protesting works? And does the latter apply only to the issue of the protest (in this case, climate), or to participation in general? Our analysis show that the participants in climate strikes who go back to the streets have both a more politicised notion of climate activism and a higher sense of the efficacy of protest. Furthermore, we show that the sense of efficacy developed by climate strikers is not limited to climate activism but applies to political participation at large.