Children, citizenship and environment: #SchoolStrike edition

The idea that children and young people are political actors no longer seems as provocative as when Bronwyn Hayward published the first edition of Children, Citizenship and Environment in 2012. Youth-led climate activism has since established itself as a political force, drawing the attention of political scientists and wider publics. In this #SchoolStrike edition, Hayward recasts data collected for the first edition through the lens of youth climate activism, allowing readers to understand ‘headline-worthy’ activism as the fruit of children’s long-expressed (but under-explored) environmental and political concerns. Based primarily on research from New Zealand, this analysis has far wider applicability.

In the first edition, Hayward argued that children were growing up in conditions of increasing social inequality, youth unemployment and environmental degradation, compounded by weakening democratic systems in neoliberal societies. One result of this democratic weakness was that children were being trained to see themselves as the solution to these problems, rather than to think critically about their causes. Hayward summarized their position as ‘SMART’ citizenship, composed of Self-help agency, Market participation, A priori justice, Representative democracy, and Technological transformation. Young people who rejected or were materially excluded from SMART citizenship could experience what Hayward termed ‘FEARS’ non-citizenship: Frustrated agency, Environmental exclusion, Authoritarian decision-making, Retributive justice, and Silenced imagination. The great contribution of Hayward’s book was – and is – to envision an alternative model of citizenship: the ‘SEEDS’ of Social agency, Environmental education, Embedded justice, Decentred deliberation, and Self-transcendence. The SEEDS citizenship framework supports Hayward’s core argument that nurturing children’s ‘democratic imagination’ is necessary for a sustainable future.

Drawing on Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, Hayward comments that ‘Just citizens are made, not born’ (p. 141), and later that ‘perhaps it is adults who most need to engage their heads and hearts as ecological citizens to support young citizens’ (p. 201). Hayward is not so much making a philosophical case for children’s democratic rights or capacities to care for the environment as she is making a political case for why adults must respond to these rights and capacities. Expressions of youth climate activism (including those predating the school strikes) show that young people are not content to be – in Hayward’s words – ‘willing volunteers and obedient recyclers’ (p. 133). As the New Zealand Climate Strikers quoted in the book write, ‘we need climate justice and that’s why we’re demanding it’ (p. 141).

Hayward’s #SchoolStrike edition may attract a wider readership than the 2012 edition. However, one hopes it will do so by moving beyond the idealized and homogenizing ideas about young people that have proliferated in recent years. Exemplifying the heterogeneity of youth responses, Hayward analyzes young people’s hopes and concerns to present a varied typology of young people, from ‘eco-worriers’, to ‘streetwise sceptics’, to ‘green entrepreneurs’. In the first edition, this typology was informed by research with 160 8–12-year-olds attending Christchurch primary schools. The new edition’s arguments are enriched by research with 13–17-year-olds conducted in Christchurch (as part of an international study) in 2018, and an epilogue presenting responses to the book from a panel of New Zealand Climate Strikers.

The new edition also incorporates twelve personal reflections from climate strikers, Indigenous and disability activists, teachers, researchers, and community advocates. These co-authors’ personal reflections help to illustrate the SEEDS framework in action. For example, possibilities for lifelong, intergenerational learning are illustrated beautifully by the disabilities and Indigenous rights activist Kera Sherwood-O’Regan, who observes that ‘Tuakana/teina is often translated as a relationship dynamic between ‘older’ and “younger” siblings or cousins within the Māori culture […] I might be a tuakana for some people who are new to climate change, regardless of age, but I may be their teina when working on issues that relate to their expertise or lived experience’ (p. 14).

Hayward’s book has a hopeful argument but is not naïve. The new edition expands on important concerns that have not been addressed sufficiently – in New Zealand or elsewhere – since the first edition: a youth mental health crisis including eco-anxiety, employment uncertainty, inequalities exacerbated by extractive capitalism, racial tensions, and domestic violence. The book also presents evidence of some young people’s apathy, indifference, distrust and resistance to collective action. Elsewhere, Hayward and colleagues (O'Brien et al., 2018) have theorized important differences in how young people express their political agency. Certainly young people’s expressions that are more in keeping with the FEARS than the SEEDS model of citizenship require further attention.

More space in the book could have been given to how young people express citizenship on their own terms. This edition reprises the typology formulated from research conducted in 2006–2010 with younger children. Although careful attention is paid to differences in the later (2018) study, it is unclear whether and how the 13–17-year-olds in this later study were able to comment on or reformulate the typology. The responses of climate strikers to the book’s arguments are also presented somewhat briefly. Such observations do not take away from the book’s considerable value or the potential it offers for other scholars to continue the important work that Hayward and others have started.

The book will be of interest across the social sciences, and particularly to scholars of environmental politics. It will also be a source of inspiration and hope to teachers, activists and young people, showcasing as it does the ideas, resistance and Indigenous knowledges that neoliberal governance of both environment and citizenship has not managed to stifle. The more broadly it is read the better for, as Hayward concludes, ‘we will need many hands, working at multiple levels’ (p. 208) to tackle the climate crisis collectively.