Young environmental activists and Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) politics: collective engagement, generational agency, efficacy, belonging and hope

ABSTRACT

Young people are increasingly engaging in diverse forms of participatory politics, especially to obtain commitments from powerholders regarding climate change. Do-It-Ourselves (DIO) politics is a helpful concept to understand much of youth-led environmental activism today. It is when citizens participate politically beyond the ballot box, personally and collectively. For young environmental activists engaging in DIO politics, the ‘doing’ is brought about by feeling the need to react to institutional inefficacy, i.e. politicians not ‘doing’ enough. The importance of ‘ourselves’ is two-fold. First, it involves young citizens taking action themselves, but not just for themselves, outside party politics. Second, it entails young people acting together as part of a global generational movement, providing belonging and hope to a marginalised cohort that is being politically socialised in challenging times. Drawing on valuable data obtained through semi-structured interviews with school climate strikers (Fridays For Future) and Extinction Rebellion (XR) activists, this article contends that many young people today form a global generation unit engaging in DIO politics, notably environmental activism, due to their specific shared lived experiences. Theoretically and qualitatively, the article provides important insights to understand this particular young cohort’s concern for the environment, agency, efficacy, collective engagement and protest actions.

KEYWORDS:

• DIO politics
• youth activism
• young environmental activists
• school climate strikes
• Fridays For Future
• Extinction Rebellion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2018) Special Report (SR15): Global Warming of 1.5°C was published on 8 October 2018 after Greta Thunberg started her school climate strikes and before Extinction Rebellion was founded (for more background on the launch of these movements, see Pickard 2021).

2 DIO politics shares a commonality with DIY culture and counterculture and environmental activism (Wall 1999), in that both involve doing something rather than doing nothing. But DIO politics tends to be on a wider scale and less alternative.

3 ‘Within this community of people with a common destiny there can then arise particular generation units. These are characterized by the fact that they do not merely involve a loose participation by a number of individuals in a pattern of events shared by all alike though interpreted by the differently individuals differently, but an identity of responses, a certain affinity in the way in which all move with and are formed by their common experiences.’ (Mannheim [1928] 1952, 306).

4 The interviews cited in this article were carried out as part of a wider research project focussing on young people’s environmental activism involving Dena Arya and Benjamin Bowman. Benjamin Bowman carried out interviews in Manchester. Dena Arya did interviews in Edinburgh, London and Nottingham. The author interviewed young environmental activists in Nottingham, London, Sheffield and Paris. The interviews in Nottingham were carried out by the author and Dena Arya together. In total, 60 young environmental activists were interviewed in late 2019.

5 All italics added by the author for emphasis.

6 To date, there has been less research on young environmental activists in the Global South (see Walker 2020; see Walker 2020; Bessant, Mejia Mesinas, and Pickard 2021).