Thew, H orcid.org/0000-0001-8671-7595, Middlemiss, L and Paavola, J (2022) “You Need a Month’s Holiday Just to Get over It!” Exploring Young People’s Lived Experiences of the UN Climate Change Negotiations. Sustainability, 14 (7). 4259. ISSN 2071-1050
Abstract
Despite youth organisations having participated as a recognised constituency (YOUNGO) in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for over a decade, few studies have explored their lived experiences of participation. Drawing upon deep ethnographic engagement with a member organisation of YOUNGO conducted between 2015 and 2018, this paper applies the “7P” model from the Youth Studies literature to explore youth participation in the UNFCCC from seven intersecting lenses: Purpose, Positioning, Perspectives, Power Relations, Protection, Place, and Process. This yields many insights into how youth participants negotiate sustainability in this context, including the Purposes or drivers motivating their participation, the ways in which youth are Positioned within the UNFCCC, the asymmetrical Power Relations they have to navigate, as well as the logistical challenges relating to their Protection, including their physical safety and psychological wellbeing. Based on rich empirical findings, we amend the 7P model of youth participation, replacing Process, which we argue is more of a methodological than an analytical concern, with Psychological Factors, which we propose is a key factor in shaping youth participation in negotiations of sustainability.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Sustainability Research Institute (SRI) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) ES/W005522/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 04 Apr 2022 15:16 |
Last Modified: | 25 Jun 2023 22:57 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MDPI |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/su14074259 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:185383 |