“We need to make our voices heard”: Claiming space for young people’s everyday environmental politics in northern Finland

Abstract

Recent years have seen a critical shift in young people’s political participation, as young people around the world have mobilized to demand greater climate actions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that consist of participant observation and 47 qualitative interviews with 15–16-year-olds residing in rural and urban areas in northern Finland, the paper contributes rural, regional and mundane perspectives on the topic of young people’s environmental politics. The paper sheds light on the myriad of ways in which young people practice environmental politics and construct their environmental citizenship and also discusses young people’s political action in relation to the friction and resistance their participation stirs up in the local communities. Although promoting active citizenship is a stated goal of the Finnish education system, young people’s active participation in mundane and local environmental politics is not always embraced in local communities. The paper argues for better recognition of and support for young people’s everyday environmental politics and for youth participation as a way to spark wider social, cultural, and political change.

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

“…In addition to twenty semi-structured interviews with students in Quebec, Dupuis-Déri (2021) draws from letters from school principals addressed to parents and pieces of media to document the way schools can be a place of political conflicts and struggles between students and adults and between students on different sides of the movement. Kettunen (2020) draws upon 4 months of participant observation and forty-seven interviews with young people between the ages of fifteen and sixteen to unpack the different ways young people practice environmental politics and construct their environmental citizenship. While not all forty-seven of her respondents claimed to be active in climate activism, the data set makes an interesting comparison between young people in Finland who did and did not strike.…”

“…In regards to young people's activism, several scholars (Pickard, 2019;Kettunen, 2020;Dupuis-Déri, 2021) note that young activists often operate outside of traditional structures, in what Pickard (2019) terms "Do-It-Ourselves" activism. In this, young people "act politically without relying on traditional collective structures, such as political parties and trade unions to inform, organize and mobilize in a top down way" (Pickard, 2019, p. 5).…”

“…Another theme regarding how young people are acting on climate change examines the constraints put on activism. Kettunen (2020) found that both inertia among peers and friction between young people and adults created barriers to participation in activism. Dupuis-Déri (2021) also found that, when operating in a school context, adult authority figures often had the final say in decision making.…”

Young people as agents in regional shrinkage – commentary to Syssner

“…In relation to the alternative perspectives and models on shrinkage that also Syssner underlines, it would also be important to investigate the ways in which young people might mobilize around, take part in, and renew multiple transition processes. Research could also illuminate the responses that young people's grassroots participation and engagement stirs up in the local communities: is the political agency of young people valued in the society (Skelton 2010) or are they considered unknowledgeable actors in their communities (Kettunen 2021). Marika Kettunen & Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola We conclude that paying attention to young people's perspectives -and similarly to other groups or minorities whose perspectives have traditionally remained unheard in the arena of regional development -and asking the who question would enable a widening of the discussion regarding what shrinking regions and shrinkage means and who the relevant actors are considered to be.…”

Youth’s everyday environmental citizenship: An analytical framework for studying interpretive agency

“…While formal traditional frames have approached environmental citizenship as a legal status (Kettunen, 2021), postcosmopolitan environmental citizenship highlights action in the private sphere and the everyday context (Huttunen et al, 2020; Huttunen and Albrecht, 2021; Kettunen, 2021; Wood, 2017; Wood and Kallio, 2019). For Dobson (2007), both private and public actions have public implications, meaning that private decisions made in cultural and social spaces can have a public environmental impact.…”