ABSTRACT
The emotions of youth climate justice activists are often demeaned or misrepresented both by popular media and by COP organisers. The COP itself, as a cold, bureaucratic, and repressive space that tokenises frontline voices to create an optics of care, is a source of frustration and disappointment for many youth activists. Despite this misrepresentation and repression, youth activists use their emotions to strengthen their movements and actions at the COP. Drawing on collaborative event ethnography spanning a decade, this paper analyses how Global South youth climate justice activists strategically navigate and channel emotion through acts of emotional solidarity, emotional concealment, and emotional display. We assess how youth activists’ complex emotional experiences exist in generative tension within individuals and within the youth climate justice movement. Our findings suggest that their emotional strategies unlock the capacity for exercising power while cultivating relationships necessary for climate justice.
Introduction
WeFootnote1 exit the subway and see bold bright posters exclaiming ‘Time for Action!’ with ticking clock imagery. The anticipation for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP)Footnote2 is palpable in the hallway. COP is a convergence of thousands of climate justice activists from disparate locations geographically, socially, culturally, and politically. It is the world’s best hope for the kind of global climate policy required to address the global climate crisis, in its 27th year at the time of writing – longer than many youth climate justice activists have been alive. We surface on the street and enter the stream of gray-suited men, women clad in brilliant reds, feathers atop their heads, and other youth with backpacks. In our first few days, we see young women from Samoa and Kenya open formal proceedings, spreading messages of urgency for the continuation of their culture and livelihoods. We see these same climate leaders shoved and kicked by police after engaging in peaceful protest over the lack of action at COP. We stand, with negotiators, and smile as youth award the ‘Fossil of the Day’ to our region of the world – the Global North. We are repeatedly denied access to rooms where policy making is supposedly taking place. We feel overwhelmed, angered, and disillusioned by this experience of a lifetime. With tears streaming down our hot cheeks, we search unsuccessfully for a quiet and comfortable corner where we can let our emotions flow. We think of how the media will see us, whether in tears, shouting in the streets, or with stoic composure as we explain the findings of the latest IPCC report – ‘childish’, our demands for a livable future ‘playground-ish’.Footnote3
On a given day, youthFootnote4 experience all of this at the COP. The emotional environment of urgency, crisis, and care is complicated by propaganda, double standards, tokenisation, infantilisation, and colonial imaginaries. On the surface, the COP is full of emotionally compelling images of climate refugees and feel-good symbols of hope. Yet it is also a repressive space where frontline activists are left feeling silenced and oppressed. While the COP is often presented to outsiders as an inclusive and vibrant space, when you physically step foot into the cavernous cement halls, bustling conference rooms, and temperature-controlled tents of the COP, it’s invariably a cold space where there’s nowhere to cry. Expressions of sadness are acceptable at predetermined times; hope and inspiration are privileged in official events for good optics; unbridled grief and anger could get you debadged – especially if you are Black, Brown, or young. The immersive propaganda and the ruse of care perpetuated by the COP does not match the complex emotional reality.
Drawing on collaborative event ethnography spanning a decade, this paper explores the subversive roles that emotion can play within the space of the COP by focusing on how youth climate justice activists from the Global South strategically deploy emotion through acts of emotional solidarity, emotional concealment, and emotional display. We assess how these activists’ complex emotional experiences exist in generative tension, motivated by the political and material shortcomings of the COP and the power of collective action.
Youth are a vital analytical category for understanding mobilisation around climate crisis. The majority of the population in regions (e.g. Africa, and Asia) most affected by and least responsible for climate crisis (Han & Ahn, Citation2020), youth have the most to lose and to gain with COP (in)action, due to the fact that our entire lives are shaped by climate crisis caused by previous generations. Youth, and particularly Global South youth, have developed a critical consciousness (Freire, Citation1973, Citation1993) of the systemic inequalities of climate crisis and translated their awareness into action, catalyzing the largest global mobilisations ever to confront this crisis. In this context, the comparatively thin attention to the social construction of age groups as opposed to other categories such as race and gender, and the lack of attention to youth in the Global South, requires further study (Neas et al., Citation2022). As Cooper et al. (Citation2019, p. 35) state, few studies about youth in the Global South are ‘taking seriously what young people say about their own lives and the socio-political contexts in which they live’. This paper contributes understanding on Global South youth experiences, perspectives, and avenues for building power, which are often misrepresented (Mayes & Hartup, Citation2022) or ignored (Neas et al., Citation2022), but are critical to building policy needed to address climate crisis and secure sustainable development. While the category of Global South youth is far from monolithic (see Mohanty, Citation1988), it is a crucial distinction and political bloc in development, UN climate policy, and social movement organising at COP.
Global South youth organising is at the heart of a broader social movement for climate justice at the COP. As a social movement, the climate justice movement must employ long-term strategies and short-term tactics to achieve its goals to sustain itself over time, mobilise more members, pressure decision-makers, and confront criticism. We argue that emotions at COP, specifically what is done through and by emotions, contribute to these goals. Our findings suggest that youth from the Global South engage emotions genuinely, thoughtfully, and strategically, using them as powerful tools of movement building and institutional subversion.
Methods
Our research is a collaborative event ethnography (CEE) embedded within the larger CEE of this special issue. Unlike traditional ethnographic methods, which rely on a single observer deeply embedded within a field site, CEE involves the creation and coordination of a team of ethnographic researchers with the aim of studying the multiple and overlapping action and decision spaces characteristic of short-term, large-scale international events (Gray et al. Citation2020). In the context of youth activism at the COP, CEE allows for distributing multiple observers across different times and locations in order to keep pace with live actions and gatherings where youth activists engage in the emotional work of movement building. In this way, diverse emotions are captured in real-time. Furthermore, CEE facilitates the inclusion of voices from different youth groups over time, which is crucial in understanding the full spectrum of youth experiences. By collaborating with each other on this paper, and with authors of this special issue, we gain insights into shifts over time and in different sectors of the COP. Our own positionalities and passions as women scholar activists, students, teachers, and researchers from the United States shape our understandings and experiences of the COP. Three of us identify as white, one as a woman of colour, and all as settlers living and working on Dakota, Anishinaabe, Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Chumash, and Piscataway territory. We all work for academic institutions.
Our analysis draws on 67 interviews and participant observation at COPs conducted from 2013 to 2022. One or two co-authors collected data at COP 19 in Warsaw, Poland in 2013 (26 interviews), COP 25 in Madrid, Spain in 2019 (22 interviews), and COP 27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in 2022 (19 interviews). We attended events, participated in protests, and recorded field notes about our experiences. After obtaining written informed consent from participants, we conducted interviews as ‘conversations with a purpose’ (Burgess, Citation1984) where interviewees discussed themes of importance to them, including youths’ journeys to activism, their assessment of COP, their understanding of climate justice, their assessment of the youth climate justice movement, the role of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the movement, and their hopes for the future. Interviews ranged from seven to 75 minutes with a mean of 25 minutes. The research protocol was approved by the Human Subjects Committee of the University of California Santa Barbara and the Institutional Review Board of College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University.
Our analysis focuses on data from interviews with activists, giving more emphasis to interviews with activists from the Global South. We categorised interviewees as Global South based on their home country or their family origin, regardless of where they lived at the time of the interview. We also categorised Indigenous activists from North America as Global South because Indigenous communities in the North face similar anticolonial struggles as communities in the South and are not afforded many of the privileges of the Global North.
We collaboratively coded our interviews through frequent meetings. We created a draft list of codes and then each coded the same two interviews from different COPs. We met to discuss inconsistencies, code definitions, and subcodes, and revised our coding list and strategy accordingly. We spent the most time developing our shared understandings of broad codes such as emotions and assessment of COP, and then gave each coder the freedom to create as many subcodes in that category as made sense to them. After this initial meeting, we divided up the interviews equally among the four co-authors for coding. After an initial round of coding, interviews were distributed to a second author for a second round of coding to promote intercoder reliability. In this process, we made sure that either the initial coder or the second coder had been in attendance at the COP where the interview took place to ensure that the context of important events at the COP was a lived experience for the coder. Throughout, we worked in ATLAS.ti web, which allows for real time collaboration. Following a collectively developed plan for analysis, we employed grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, Citation1967), a method which searches for common themes and patterns in data as a basis for analysis. Through conversation, we built consensus to focus on the prevalent themes of how emotions are displayed, concealed, and experienced by Global South youth. We then collaboratively wrote and revised each section.
Emotions and the youth climate justice movement
The climate justice movement calls for leadership from and accountability to those most affected by the climate crisis and demands transformational system change that addresses the root causes of the crisis (Dayaneni, Citation2009). Over time, the movement has become much more intersectional in its analysis of climate impacts and solutions, striving to build a movement of everyone to change everything (Foran et al., Citation2019). It operates simultaneously at local and global levels, with the COPs as key sites of relationship building and mobilisation (Foran et al., Citation2017; Grosse & Mark, Citation2020; MacKay et al., Citation2020). Youth have been at the forefront of the climate justice movement since the beginning, demonstrating the power of relationships and a shared sense of injustice to bring people together across lines that typically divide (Foran et al., Citation2017; Grosse, Citation2019; Grosse, Citation2022).Footnote5
The media tends to flatten and dismiss the multiplicity of emotions in the youth climate justice movement to delegitimise their political demands. In their study of how youth are portrayed in Australian newspapers, Mayes and Hartup (Citation2022) highlight how media paint youth climate strikers as ‘ignorant zealots’, brainwashed by radical teachers and parents and ignorant of science; ‘anxious pawns’, impressionable children propelled by mass hysteria; ‘rebellious truants’, teens full of hormones, anger, and frivolity; and ‘extraordinary heroes’ who are spectacular, but in a tokenised way defined and conditioned by adults.Footnote6 These characterisations trivialise youths’ commitment (see also Bergmann & Ossewaarde, Citation2020), distracting from their campaigns and continuing a long history of silencing and villainising marginalised voices through labelling them as ‘emotional’ (Ahmed, Citation2004) or ‘angry’ (Cooper, Citation2018). In the youth climate justice movement, BIPOC and Global South activists, despite their long-standing organising, receive much less attention (Barnes, Citation2021; Neas et al., Citation2022) and disproportionately face intersectional racist and sexist attacks that undermine their work (Rafaely & Barnes, Citation2020). To challenge media depictions, greater attention to the complexity of youth climate activists’ emotions from their own perspectives and imaginaries is critical (Mayes & Hartup, Citation2022).
Existing scholarship shows that youth climate justice activists’ emotions are not, as the media suggests, one-dimensional. A growing body of scholarship demonstrates that children and youth increasingly experience anxiety, distress, grief, trauma, and despair around environmental destruction and climate change (Burgess, Citation1984; Gislason et al., Citation2021; Hickman et al., Citation2021; MacDonald et al., Citation2013; Ojala, Citation2016). Disturbing emotions related to climate change can lead to paralysis and inaction, yet those who report ‘eco-anxiety’ are twice as likely to say they are motivated to change their behaviour to counteract climate change (Coffey et al., Citation2021); climate activists are said to experience ‘a series of turbulent emotional stages’ that lead them from apathy to action (Bright & Eames, Citation2022, p. 13). Youth climate activists understand the gravity of the climate crisis, experience grief and distress as a result, and translate these emotions into action.
Research on climate anxiety often centres white privileged Global North experiences (Ray, Citation2020; e.g. Ojala, Citation2016). However, BIPOC and Global South communities experience more severe climate impacts, face distinct impacts on mental wellbeing (Tiatia et al., Citation2023), and care more about the climate crisis (Ballew et al., Citation2020). Sultana (Citation2022) argues that ‘climate coloniality’, how the climate crisis reproduces colonialism, is deeply felt by marginalised communities, and can create complex emotions, including ‘rage, resolve, frustration’ and ‘an overwhelming responsibility to act’ (3). However, ‘attention to emotions (and power) within discussions of climate change response remain thin and have tended to lack sensitivity to agency, power and mobility’ (Wright et al., Citation2022, p. 566). For this reason, it is important to centre the emotions and perspectives of BIPOC and Global South youth in the climate justice movement.
In mainstream social movement literature, the combination and interaction of emotions remains relatively underexplored, despite their importance (Jasper, Citation2011). Black feminist scholars, however, have long emphasised the importance of reclaiming emotions arising from experiences of injustice as motivation for community organising (Collins, Citation2000; Cooper, Citation2018; Hooks, Citation2000). The creation, shaping, or prevention of feelings is important for activists, who spend much time and energy in the management of emotions, or ‘emotion work’ (Hochschild, Citation2012; Jacobsson & Lindblom, Citation2013). Social movement actions can simultaneously produce contradictory ‘extra-movement’ and ‘intra-movement’ emotional outcomes (Earl, Citation2000; Juris, Citation2008). On the one hand, actions can be used as fodder for stigmatising media representations as we describe above (see also Juris, Citation2008). On the other hand, actions spur deeply felt emotions that are critical to sustaining loose networks of activists that gather at global summits like COP.
Juris (Citation2008) calls this transformation of emotion affective solidarity – ‘amplifying an initiating emotion, such as anger or rage, and transferring it into a sense of collective identity’ (65). In this sense, protests play a dual role of displaying intense emotions while also generating the real-time conditions for collective feelings of joy and solidarity (Juris, Citation2008, p. 66). Juris does not clearly differentiate between affect and emotion, and notes that ‘emotional solidarity’ updates Collins (Citation1990) concept of ‘emotional energy’. In line with Shouse (Citation2005), we use the term emotion throughout to describe ‘the projection/display of a feeling’ – how feelings interact with social environments. Sometimes, a broadcast of emotions ‘is an expression of our internal state and other times it is contrived in order to fulfill social expectations’ (Shouse, Citation2005). Affect, in contrast, is ‘a non-conscious experience of intensity’ (Shouse, Citation2005). We also recognise that emotions, including those associated with climate crisis (Sultana, Citation2022), often differ by social location, sexual identity, and experience, which can fracture collective identities, solidarity, and understandings (Robnett, Citation2004; Rowe & Royster, Citation2017).
Studying complex emotions of youth climate activists has both theoretical and practical value – centreing BIPOC and Global South youth and challenging media depictions of youth emotions is critical for enhancing the legitimacy of the youth climate justice movement and for understanding the role of emotions in social movements in the era of climate crisis.
Youth emotions, strategy, and action at COP
Our experiences as and conversations with youth climate justice activists demonstrate that youth deploy emotions at COP through three primary strategies, all of which enhance individual capacity to contribute to the movement and collective power to advance climate justice. We categorise these strategies as building emotional solidarity, concealing emotion, and displaying emotion.
Emotional solidarity: sustaining the movement
Interviewees overwhelmingly expressed both positive and negative emotions about their experience at COP, their assessment of how the negotiations are going, and their anticipations for the future. Below, we provide examples of negative and positive emotions and discuss how youth not only navigate these emotions internally, but draw on them to build relationships and construct movement strategies.
Negative emotional responses
Heavy emotions, particularly anger, anxiety, and frustration, were most prevalent among all interviewees. Their frustrations stemmed from material, financial, and social access barriers as well as negotiations that continually failed to meet the needs of the Global South. It is important to note that youth often experience the COP differently from adults and other marginalised groups. While all of civil society is excluded from certain spaces in COP, youth’s experience of exclusion is amplified by living their entire lives within climate crisis they did not cause as they simultaneously lack access to positions of power and the ability to voice political concerns (e.g. voting) across levels of government. They also encounter the COP process during a formative time of their social development and identity formation.
For youth to gain entry to COP, they must first secure a badge from an accredited non-governmental organisation (NGO). This is a major barrier to youth involvement, and when youth are able to secure badges, they then have to secure funding for their trip. With the exception of COP 20 in Lima, Peru, every COP since 2013 has been located in the geographical North (with six in Europe), presenting immense cost and logistical barriers for Global South attendees. COP 27 and COP 26 had intense lodging barriers, with either too few accommodations or accommodations priced many times the typical cost. COP 25 changed venues from Chile to Spain within three weeks of the start date, resulting in youth having to pay change fees for cancelled reservations. Global South youth typically also have much more complex visa requirements for entry to COP destinations than Global North youth.
When youth make it into COP, they experience barriers to understanding what is going on and to feeling valued in the space. One activist (COP 19) explained how her Brazilian organisation was forced to prioritise sending English-speaking youth: ‘It’s so much money that we spent to be here and to be here and not understand anything because you don’t speak English, yes it’s a problem’. Most youth, especially during their first COP, describe it as overwhelming – ‘chaos’, said a Nigerian activist (COP 27), who described her first day of not knowing where to start, what to do, or where to go, and therefore, risking getting nothing out of COP, with the adage from her home: ‘if you try to catch two rats at the same time, it is most possible you lose both’. The gigantic venues are difficult to navigate, there is a lack of centralisation or standardisation of advertising about events at country and NGO pavilions, and audio and translation quality can be poor. An Indigenous activist (COP 25, US) described it all as ‘very sterile’, emphasising the oppressive consequences of the material and social dynamics at COP:
This place needs healing … . The energy in here … sucks energy out of everyone … . As Indigenous people we’re continuously fighting. There’s no time for us to heal. And we’re always continuously silenced here … . I haven’t felt uplifted in this space. I’ve made space for myself. We’ve made space for ourselves. And yet we’re—blame gets put on us when we do that, like the action that was done yesterday.
Within the youth climate justice movement, youth of colour also face tokenism and Global North/South tensions. These tensions arise in part from the ways in which youths’ intersectional identities shape their emotions and how they manage them, with Global North interviewees having more privilege to choose pessimism – which they express more often than their Global South counterparts – without condemning their communities to immediate suffering. Global North interviewees also feel safer during protest and police interactions than Global South youth, who report experiencing fear and repression in the same interactions. Emotions within the movement, then, can splinter unevenly based on youth positionality. Despite these tensions, we observed tremendous solidarity in actions during the final days of each COP in this research (see Figures 1 and 3), demonstrating bridging (even if temporary) of emotional tensions.
Beyond the negative emotions related to access and the oppressive nature of the social and material space, youth are tremendously frustrated by the negotiation process and the slowness with which it occurs. It is important to note that youth are not overly idealistic in their expectations of the COP process; they do not come to the COP seeking silver bullet solutions. Rather, many come to support actions to safeguard frontline communities through the creation of loss and damage funds and adaptation frameworks. Many express that they come to the COP knowing they will face some disappointment. As a Brazilian activist (COP 19) put it, ‘We didn’t have high expectations for it, so it’s about balancing your expectations’. Yet many are still surprised by what they see as a woeful lack of ambition among negotiators. Youth also highlight the overrepresentation of Global North negotiating teams (which are much larger than those from the Global South), lack of attention to Global South needs, and lack of access to negotiating spaces. An activist from India (COP 27) explained, ‘Our voices are not even being heard or acknowledged by the developed countries … being from the Global South, I feel bad … not being noticed, and not even being talked about … very frustrating’.
Global South youth express anger about the structure of COP where privileged people are making decisions with little real engagement with civil society or knowledge of what is happening on the ground. ‘You’re staying in a five-star hotel, no offense, and you want to decide whether we have food or not? It’s not fair, because you don’t know what we are going through’ (Nigerian activist, COP 27). An activist from Cameroon (COP 27) emphasised the patriarchal quality of this dynamic: ‘All those big men that come with well-dressed suits, the nice, high places, we are down there, they don’t know what we feel’. She felt disturbed by all the ‘little things that you take notice of that tick you off … it’s done purposely so that you, your soul is crushed and you’re demotivated to even participate’. An example of a ‘little thing’ that made this interviewee feel ‘upset’, ‘frantic’, and ‘livid’ was being kicked out of a negotiating room due to space constraints. Ironically, this occurred the day after Youth Day – a day meant to highlight the importance of youth participation. Class barriers, patriarchy, and adultism each shape Global South youth experiences in ways that contribute to intersecting exclusions from COP spaces.
This is all in addition to the sense of despair and anxiety that the climate crisis spurs for youth, in a much more powerful way than for elderly heads of state running the world. A US activist (COP 19) recalled a moment when he shared his own feelings of despair to a room full of youth activists and was surprised to see how many heads were nodding in agreement. ‘That was a pretty good solidarity moment’, he laughed. In this way, feelings of frustration can create emotional bonds between youth activists. For those who are new to the COP process, the feeling of disempowerment can be overwhelming. A South African activist (COP 27) expressed how disconnected the official process is from the youth who attend: ‘What is disheartening, and I shouldn’t have been surprised by this, is the lack of actual climate action and climate justice action that people are taking within the decision-making spaces – the spaces that we aren’t allowed in’. Yet climate anxiety can also mobilise youth to join movements. This interviewee told us how he went into a deep depression when he realised that ‘climate change is killing us’. He then found ‘a way to channel’ his emotion into climate activism:
There’s a quote from a book called Anger is a Gift, which basically says, You can’t let it stew inside of you, you’ve got to utilize it, and put it somewhere productive. And I think that’s what I try doing … . now, [I’m] a part of quite an amazing network of young people and civil society wanting to bring change forward.
Positive emotional responses
At the same time, youth experience emotions of joy and transformation. They gain hope and inspiration from social movements, excitement from policy progress, and express empathy, compassion, gratitude, and pride. They are intensely committed to the cause and even experience love, happiness, and enjoyment at COP. Many maintain optimism about limiting the climate crisis.
All of these emotions come together in what youth widely consider to be the most positive part of COP – the uniting of youth, often through organising and participating in protest. They realise they are not alone, share knowledge, skills, and emotions with each other, and come away with new tools to take back to their movements at home. As a Ghanaian activist (COP 19) explained, ‘you get to share your experiences, share your struggles, and then know how to move forward from there. So [COP] gives you the extra strength to do more when you go back’. An activist from India (COP 27), who initially felt extremely discouraged, found positivity through unity: ‘There is an entire community waiting for you … you just have to take that first step towards activism and then people will take you forward’. Youth find support from others as they recharge, share frustrations, and discover alternative pathways for climate action ().
Figure 1. Youth singing and linking hands during takeover of plenary action, COP 25 (photo by Corrie Grosse).
The sense of hope and motivation that youth gain from each other stems from their relationships and commitments to justice. Youth from the Global North and Global South stress the need for compassion, ‘an emotional connect’, (Scottish activist, COP 19) that builds bridges across difference. They are quick to join actions in solidarity, get together for conversation, and stay in touch long after COP, building global networks.
Good and bad, together, always
Navigating simultaneous emotions: positivity and negativity, urgency and thoughtfulness
Most youth activists hold these positive and negative emotions simultaneously; a South African activist explained, ‘I think my first experience of COP 27 has just been a mix of excitement and happiness for the networking and solidarity, but anger and upset and sadness because of the lack of political will from our leaders’. Both negative and positive emotions work to build solidarity: negative emotions like frustration indicate a shared understanding of the problem, and positive emotions like hope indicate a shared understanding of the solution. Shared understandings are critical to building collective identity in social movements (Melucci, Citation1989).
In addition to juggling gratitude, excitement, frustration, and feeling overwhelmed, youth strive to reconcile a sense of urgency – to act on their own behalf or on the behalf of the frontline communities they are there to represent – while simultaneously trying to bring people in and engage in a meaningful way that is not reactionary. An activist from the US (COP 19) expressed how she was working to engage with diverse perspectives and focus on system change, rather than individual-level change. As she said, ‘It’s just this thing we have to figure out together, and I accept that we may or may not figure it out in time. But I’ll do my best to help out’. This messiness of potentially conflicting emotions – positivity and negativity, urgency and thoughtfulness – is a defining feature of emotions at COP, shared by the overwhelming majority of interviewees.
As youth activists negotiate complex emotions, they build capacity, awareness, and community in line with what Anna Tsing (Citation2004) describes as generative friction, which motivates new actions, understandings, and possibilities. This internal frictionFootnote7 between emotions is a shared experience, and together, youth work through it to prefigure a future where diverse people and movements have relationships of trust capable of building just solutions to the climate crisis. In this sense, youth derive emotional solidarity from emotions held in tension, and use that solidarity to maintain resilience and build collective strength at the COP.
Emotion concealment: confronting criticism
Youth activists at the COP choose to conceal their emotions in some contexts, while displaying them in others – what Coe and Schnabel (Citation2011) call the ‘orchestration of emotion work’. First, we discuss how the policed and adult-dominated space of the COP constrains youths’ ability to use emotions as an organising tool. Most commonly, youth refrain from expressing the full extent of their frustrations at the COP out of fear of reprisals, including physical violence from the security and debadging, which threatens their ability to attend the conference as well as jeopardising the attendance of future delegates from their organisation. For instance, a South African activist (COP 27) explained how youth who speak out risk getting targeted as contrarians.
You almost get targeted as someone that is just you know, being too controversial, or contrarian, that is just starting to stir the pot. … When you post something, you have to be conscious of who sees it … . But this is not the type of space [where we can be authentic on social media] because it’s all suits. And we as young people have this radical vibe of just wanting to be, you know, voicing out … for the right message, for the right people. But we can’t do that, because we might actually get in trouble. So the one tool that is so powerful can be also destructive to the people that are trying to bring our voice into this space.
Repercussions are especially severe for those who are marginalised and whose attendance at COP is precarious due to political barriers and economic circumstances, including many Global South youth, and can be heightened by the context in which the COP is held.Footnote8 Global South youth, and particularly Indigenous women youth, have been subjected to harsh treatment from security guards in the wake of nonviolent civil disobedience. Global North youth in the climate justice movement are often attuned to the disproportionate barriers faced by Global South youth. A Norwegian activist (COP 25) reflected on the experience of having been ‘cramm[ed] … into the backyard where we couldn’t leave’ after an action, noting,
I heard there were a lot of Indigenous women who felt really unsafe. And you also heard a lot of rumors about guards being physical … for me, it wasn’t as scary, but I felt for my fellow participants who have experienced police violence and have been suppressed and physically attacked.
While fear of reprisals was the foremost motivation for youth to conceal their frustrations and concerns at the COP, some also mentioned other compounding factors. An activist from Fiji at COP 25 commented that in addition to not wanting their badges to be removed, Fijian youth had to overcome cultural norms in order to speak out:
In the Fijian setting, for us youth when we’re with elderly or with adults, it’s difficult for us to speak. Sometimes it’s considered rude, especially when we have like a community setting, when you’re in a community village and there’s a meeting, often women and youth are at the back and it’s the men who are making the decisions.
If physical violence and debadging are a stick to punish youth for voicing emotions deemed inappropriate, COP organisers also wield a carrot: the promise that youth will be taken seriously if they limit themselves to non-subversive (e.g. tokenised) emotional displays and otherwise adhere to an unemotional, fact-filled discursive style. A Nigerian activist (COP 27) commented that he initially saw the youth climate justice movement as lacking substance and only ‘taking the mic and shouting “climate justice,”’ but was encouraged to notice how youth have been increasingly successful in ‘really talking the language of decision-makers’. He characterised this new discursive style as involving ‘putting out facts’ rather than ‘empty words’ and ‘making bolder statements’. For some, the choice to conceal emotions mirrors their theory of change, in this case, their belief that change will happen within existing structures. A French activist at COP 19 encouraged youth to ‘confront policymakers’ in a way that ‘chang[es] their opinions … about young people’. He commented that policymakers
expect [you] to sit there and be like, ‘Ugh, you’re mean’ and ‘Ugh, I’m angry, I want change’. But when you actually get to talk to them and present the research, the whatever you have for them, they’re often very impressed and they didn’t expect that.
Emotion display: pressuring decision-makers
Despite the repressive context, youth also choose to display emotions at particular times to build the climate justice movement and to pressure decision makers to prioritise the needs of frontline communities. To illustrate this, we offer four ethnographic vignettes of COP actions that mobilise particular emotions. At the end of the section, we provide analytical synthesis of these actions.
Grief: Warsaw, 2013
It is the opening of COP 19 in a giant football stadium in Warsaw. ‘Beeeep, beeeep, beeeep’ drones over the speakers, attempting to curtail the words of Yeb Saño, the young Filipino delegate, who is far beyond his three-minute time allotment.Footnote9 Just three days before, Super Typhoon Haiyan made landfall in the Philippines, leaving half a million people homeless and killing over six thousand. Tears well in the eyes of global negotiators as he expresses his agony, waiting for word about the fate of his relatives. He implores delegates to act – ‘We can stop this madness, right now, right here’ – and announces the commencement of his hunger strike for meaningful action at COP. As he leaves the plenary room, youth activists rise, escorting him in solidarity and unfurling an unsanctioned bannerFootnote10 that reads ‘2012, Bopha, 1067; 2013, Haiyan, 10,000-plus? How many more have to die?’ The UNFCCC Secretariat responds by kicking these youth out of the conference and banning them from COP for periods of five years to life.
Anger and fear: Madrid, 2019
‘Where’s it happening? Is it sanctioned?’ youth whisper. The echoey cement walls of COP 25 are abuzz when youth, women, Indigenous, and Global South activists join together, flowing toward the doors of a large plenary room. Shouts for climate justice and the clang and bang of pots and pans – following the protest tradition of cacerolazoFootnote11 – escalate in volume as hundreds gather. The noise-making and shouting is a profoundly necessary emotional release for activists – ‘heartwarming’ (activist from Global North) – amidst the bleak emotional tenor of COP 25. Suddenly, stern black-clad security join arms, forcibly corralling protestors, youth and adults, and pushing them out into the chill and wifi-less December air through side doors. As the doors close, youth activists left inside fear for their friends. Whispers of debadging circulate and no one on the outside can be reached. An Indigenous baby is inside without their parent. Outraged civil society constituencies, but not YOUNGO, the youth constituency,Footnote12 prepare letters condemning the actions of the Secretariat. Tensions brew among youth: protect what some see as a tenuous position at COP, or speak out and sign the letters, in line with their hearts? ()
Figure 2. Security blockade of climate justice action, COP 25 (Photo by Corrie Grosse).
Mobilising grief, anger, fear, and discontent: walk outs
Warsaw, 2013
We gather in the appropriate hall at the appropriate time, whipping out our makeshift 8.5 × 11 printed posters and taping them to our coordinated white t-shirts: ‘Polluters talk, we walk, Volveremos!’ We start walking. Soon, the mass of us transforms from small streams to a river flowing out the great front doors. We fill the giant staircase leading to COP. Joy, laughter, and wonder fills our faces. It feels as if the weight on our hearts – the weight of the stark contrast between COP 19’s slogan, ‘I care’, and its utter failure to achieve meaningful mitigation targets and financing – is lifted, just a little. Youth activists from disparate organisations chat and smile, making plans for when they return (volver) to Lima for COP 20 ().
Figure 3. Walk out at COP 19 (Photo by Corrie Grosse).
Sharm el-Sheikh, 2022
The conference room is filled with energy. Whereas the official negotiations we have been able to access are strictly regimented and sparsely attended, this room is crammed with people, none of whom are yawning or checking their phones. The People’s Plenary begins with a prayer by an Indigenous activist from Brazil. Then we hear from other climate justice organisers from all over the world, working on gender justice, disability justice, and labour rights. For the first time in any talk we’ve heard at the COP, a speaker mentions pro-democracy Egyptian youth activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, whose wrongful imprisonment for his organising in the Arab Spring overshadows the entire conference. Echoing the title of his collection of essays – You have not yet been defeated – many speakers end their speeches with, ‘We have not yet been defeated, and we will never be’. We chant for climate justice and pump our fists in the air. The drum of our feet fills the room with the sound of thunder. We rise, offering a standing ovation. In song, we walk out of the conference room and into the hot, dry sunlight: Power to the people, because the people have the power. Tell me can you feel it, getting stronger by the hour?
Satire and fun in Warsaw, 2013: A generative refusalFootnote13 of COP as usual
‘Lemonade for sale!’ Youth activists at COP 19 stand behind a popup lemonade stand, fundraising for the Adaptation Fund. A ripped dollar bill, 5 Norwegian crowns, a bus ticket, and a dinner receipt fill the bowl. Cheers erupt as organisers announce that the donation of a coin or two has doubled the amount currently in the Adaptation Fund. When their lemonade selling concludes, organisers are excited to cut a check to the officials responsible for the Adaptation Fund. Onlookers sport red pins that read: ‘#WTF? Where’s the finance?’ ()
Figure 4. Lemonade stand to raise money for the Adaptation Fund (photo by John Foran).
Across the COP space, three young women parade through the venue, distracting mock negotiators with feather boas and beaming smiles while they take the adaptation funds they need – a stark contrast to hard, dour expressions of actual negotiators who walk briskly by so many youth protests at so many COPs. Are the real negotiators’ serious expressions a thin facade for their heartache at their inability to answer youths’ pleas for a livable world, or are they just hardened shells around heartless souls? The women, part of the Brazilian organisation Engajamudo, are creating their ‘Sexify COP’ video,Footnote14 which ends with the slogan ‘Equity is hotter than climate change’. Their video is just one of the fun ways they ‘take climate change out of the closet’ to engage with youth who, like adults, do not get inspired by acronyms (Brazilian activist, COP 19).
Synthesis: emotional displays build power
These actions by youth build power in diverse ways. Saño’s expression of grief and devastation – weeping during a UN speech – unleashed what we would all express, to varying degrees, if we were to take climate science and past, current, and future climate disasters seriously. By showing his humanity, he spurred a sense of humanity in others, with youth acting on these feelings by joining him and engaging in a solidarity hunger strike. That COP 19 failed to appropriately respond to Saño’s grief ignited fire in the hearts of youth activists to return to COP 20 with renewed pressure on negotiators, a pressure that continues today, when the foundations for a Loss and Damage funding framework are solidifying after COP 27.
Anger at the exclusion of frontline communities, exacerbated by the last-minute change of COP 25’s venue from Chile to its coloniser, Spain, and prioritising of market approaches to climate mitigation that harm Indigenous people (Cabello & Gilbertson, Citation2012; Gilbertson & Reyes, Citation2009; Stabinsky, Citation2021), fuelled the need among youth and adult climate justice activists for emotional release and healing through joining, singing, and cacerolazo during the Madrid unsanctioned action. Anger at repression by the police – which was more severe for marginalised participants – united most youth and civil society even further in their collective understandings of the exclusive nature of the COP process, strengthening the coalition between youth and adults in the climate justice movement. This collective understanding, grounded in recognition of the need for inclusion, is critical for a broad-based collective identity, or a sense of ‘we-ness’ that strengthens the climate justice movement. COP walkouts, which occurred at all three COPs we attended, further this sense of togetherness while also providing momentary respite from the heaviness of climate justice work and frontline experience. Uniting with others, collectively organising, and achieving the victory of a successful action – however small – matters (Solnit, Citation2016). It builds a history and confidence that ‘can become a torch we can carry into the night that is the future’ (Solnit, Citation2016: xxvi).
Finally, satire, and especially robust Global South women- and Indigenous-led humour, bursts all norms and expectations of COP. These youth actions critique the COPs’ failures while simultaneously demonstrating new ways of being and relating to each other that prefigure (Yates, Citation2021) the future they want to see. In this sense, actions like Sexify are akin to what Anishinaabe scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Citation2021) calls a ‘generative refusal’ and what Foran et al. (Citation2017) call a ‘political culture of creation’. What if a desire for pleasure and wellbeing, rather than profits, drove the negotiations? These actions show the cracks in socially constructed systems that are assumed to be beyond change – the political process of COP, capitalism, and a neoliberal global order. As adrienne maree brown writes, by generating power ‘from the overlapping spaces of desire and aliveness’ we can tap into ‘an abundance that has enough attention, liberation, and justice for all of us to have plenty’ (Citation2019, p. 12).
Conclusion
Through this collaborative event ethnography, we have listened to what Global South youth themselves say about their emotional experiences of climate (in)action at the COP. While media portrayals depict youth as hot-headed yet empty-headed, we find that youth experience many intense and potentially conflicting emotions, including anger, disappointment, and feeling overwhelmed at the inaccessible and hostile structure of the COP; worry and care about how to navigate youth organising spaces within this fraught environment; and excitement, joy, and gratitude at getting to connect with other youth and participate in the making of history. Through individual and collective practices of emotional solidarity, emotional concealment, and emotional display, Global South youth protect their own near-term wellbeing, empower their organisations, and work within and against flawed systems to advance meaningful climate policy. They strategically use emotion to build the movement through emotional solidarity, to pressure decision-makers through emotional display (which contributes to emotional solidarity), and to confront criticism through emotional concealment.
Intersecting oppressions shape Global South youth experiences and emotions as they are disproportionately excluded from COP spaces. While both Global North and Global South youth chose to conceal or display emotions strategically, the rationale behind these choices may be slightly different. For example, one Global South youth chose to conceal their emotions due to social norms in their country where youth are expected to stay quiet and listen to adults, and others may conceal their emotions because of the disproportionate dangers that speaking up with an angry tone might pose for them. Future research could further compare Global North and Global South youth emotion strategies, as well as those of different gender or age categories.
While Juris (Citation2008) suggests affective solidarity built through protest events can diminish over time, our collaborative event ethnography allowed us to see that gathering at COPs grew emotional solidarity among youth activists over time, paralleling the increased success and visibility of the climate justice movement over the last decade. Additionally, although youth activists at the COP are just one small part of the youth climate justice movement as a whole, many are well-connected, and their experiences at COP inform their organising practices in their home countries. In the face of climate catastrophe and international inaction, youth transform potentially heart- and mind-breaking emotions into tools of resistance, subversion, sustenance, and ultimately survival.
Acknowledgements
We thank John Foran, Tom Hobday, Emily Williams, Natasha Weidner, and our UCSB research team in Warsaw for their help in collecting interviews. We thank the undergraduate research assistants at UCSB who helped edit transcripts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Julia Coombs Fine
Julia Coombs Fine is a postdoctoral researcher at the George Mason Center for Climate Change Communication. Her recent research focuses on how interpersonal conversations can promote collective climate action.
Summer Gray
Summer Gray is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She researches crucial dilemmas surrounding climate change adaptation and conceptualizes frameworks that promote climate justice and critical resilience.
Corrie Grosse
Corrie Grosse is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at College of St. Benedict and St. John's University. She teaches and researches energy, climate justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and social movements.
Brigid Mark
Brigid Mark is a graduate student in the Sociology PhD program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research areas include climate justice, social movements, Indigenous sovereignty, and race.
Notes
1 ‘We’ refers to one or more of the authors and the other youth activists with whom authors attended various COPs.
2 This vignette is a synthesis of our combined experiences at several COPs.
3 Middle-aged white man Richard Madeley used these words to describe youth activist Miranda Whelan’s work with Just Stop Oil on Good Morning Britain in April 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6T-iwy0bOU
4 The designation of ‘youth’ at the UN climate talks is broadly conceived and includes young adults under the age of thirty-five.
5 Despite this, there is relatively little literature about youth at COP. For example, youth are conspicuously absent from the 2021 book on COP coalitions: Coalitions in The Climate Change Negotiations (Betzold et al., Citation2021).
6 Access to being lauded as a hero is subjective and unevenly distributed according to privilege, and was relatively uncommon in Mayes and Hartup’s research analysis.
7 Friction across individuals within the youth climate justice movement, however, is not necessarily generative; it can lead to splintering along axes of differences. We do not have the data to sufficiently explore this critical topic and suggest it as a generative area of future research.
8 COP27 in Egypt was seen as particularly repressive (see Klein, Citation2022), although repression was present at all COPs we observed.
9 We join Nixon (Citation2013) in admiration of Saño’s ‘readiness – his desperate readiness – to crash right through the wall of bureaucratic language [… putting] his whole body, his whole being, behind his words’. Saño’s embodiment of grief as a call for urgent action contrasts with what Nixon calls the ‘slow violence’ of the climate crisis.
10 All actions and protest materials at COP must be pre-approved by the UNFCCC Secretariat. Participants in unsanctioned actions risk being ‘debadged’, losing their ability to enter COP.
11 The cacerolazo protest tradition has been used by activists throughout Latin America and other nations to call attention to injustice. Chileans used cacerolazo during the 2019 protests against inequality that caused the COP to be held in Spain rather than Chile.
12 There are nine constituencies in the UNFCCC composed of NGOs with shared interests. Constituencies are the formal channels for communication between NGOs and the UNFCCC Secretariat.
13 Simpson (Citation2021) uses ‘generative refusal’ to describe affirmations of Indigenous resurgence, actions that build new worlds, with new political economies, ethical systems, and relationships.
14 #Sexify COP19 – Equity. 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgMM47Cndk4
Related Research Data
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