Motivators of Participation and Non-Participation in Youth Environmental Protests

Abstract

This paper is an exploratory study investigating motivators of teenagers to both attend and not attend a climate change related protest event. Using open-ended surveys and focus groups, 16–19-year-old Australian students were asked about their motivators to attend and abstain from School Strike 4 Climate events. Through qualitative analysis and thematic coding, results show key motivators to attend a Strike include climate change and acts of political participation that provide youth with a public voice. Protest is positioned as a key part of teen political repertoires. Reasons for non-attendance included prioritizing schoolwork and low efficacy in protest or participatory action. However, low efficacy in climate change mitigation, or an outright rejection of climate science, was not evident in this sample. Overall, reasons for attendance and non-attendance at a Strike event were not direct mirror images of the other, and implications for inclusion of non-participants in further studies is discussed in this light.

Who’s striking, and who’s not? Avoiding and acknowledging bias in youth climate activism research

“…That is to say, structures of governance within a school can lead to '"no pedagogically acceptable language" to contest school practices' (Mayes, 2020, p. 460). For example, in my own research, positive relationships with school executives have led to 'nominations' of exemplar students to be the face of their school in our discussions of the School Strike (Feldman, 2021). This governmentality may limit opportunities for students (whether cognisant or not) to freely criticise the powers that influence their daily lives and choices around the School Strike.…”

“…We see this in the School Strike 4 Climate case, where parental or academic control may be influencing participation in a Strike (see, e.g. Feldman, 2021). For example, many state-level administrators currently only enable youth participation in research via parental consent, even with older, upper high school students in the public system.…”

“…That is, attendance-enabling factors are explored, and the absence of these taken as reasons for non-attendance at a protest. But there may be any number of reasons why publics (including young people) may disengage from scientific issues, which are distinct and different from either apathy (see Burns & Medvecky, 2018) or protest attendance (see Feldman, 2021). Despite this, much international and local research on the School Strike 4 Climate movement has taken advantage of convenience sampling through School Strike events themselves.…”

“…In their movement, School Strikers face a complex ecosystem where agency is afforded to them by people in positions of power, and political engagement is seen as something that is acquired in a top-down fashion from parents, schools or 'more knowledgeable' adults (Andersson, 2015). These same young people are often dismissed as too inexperienced to participate in politics (Bessant, 2020b), or further criticised for their perceived inability to engage with climate policy, specifically (Feldman, 2020). By classic measures of political engagement, they are often seen as 'disengaged' from polity, not participating in forms of political behaviour that previous generations would easily identify (such as campaigning or joining unions) (Delli Carpini, 2000), despite youth political behaviours simply evolving over time (Norris, 2003;Pickard, 2019).…”

Young people's climate activism: A review of the literature

“…Researchers have worked to identify the underlying motivations young people have for becoming climate activists. Governmental inaction and the sense that politicians are failing them is a common source of motivation; this is true among young climate strikers in the UK (Pickard et al, 2020;Elsen and Ord, 2021;Feldman, 2021) and is a common narrative in the Fridays For Future movement as a whole (Han and Ahn, 2020). Haugestad et al (2021) and Martiskainen et al (2020) found a variety of motivations for participation among climate strikers in Canada, the USA, the UK (Martiskainen et al, 2020) and Norway (Haugestad et al, 2021).…”