(Water) bottles and (street) barricades: the politicisation of lifestyle-centred action in youth climate strike participation

ABSTRACT

In resisting climate change, to what extent can lifestyle forms of activism be considered to be political? What are their determinants and to what extent do they differ from the determinants of other forms of action? What role do generational factors play? Does the centrality of lifestyle changes for young participants translate into a disaffection towards more traditional forms of action? This article explores the forms of action adopted by participants in two Fridays For Future (FFF) strikes, focusing on the repertoires of action of (young) climate justice protesters. We draw on protest survey data covering the FFF demonstrations held in 15 European countries in March and September 2019. Starting from a sharp generational contrast between the importance given to individual lifestyle changes in addressing the climate emergency, we investigate whether this results in significant generational differences in the choice of the repertoires of action. Challenging the vision of young people as ‘disaffected citizens’, it is demonstrated that young protesters do not participate less in claim-based action than older cohorts. Furthermore, a process of politicisation can be seen to be unfolding that leads to increased commitment in both lifestyle and political forms of participation – at least among active milieus.

KEYWORDS:

• Youth activism
• climate activism
• Fridays For Future
• survey data
• Europe
• climate justice

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 ‘Repertoire of collective action’ is the expression used to describe the toolbox on which collective actors draw. From the French Revolution onwards, it has essentially been based on the expression of claims in public events that address public authorities (Tilly 1978).

2 In order to acknowledge the relevance of young people in climate governance and following on from the United Nations Youth Climate Summit held in New York in 2019, the UN launched the first COP-related event specifically dedicated to young activists from September 28th to 30th 2021. The event took place in Milan with the title ‘Youth4Climate: Driving Ambition’ and consisted of working group activities and a final debate involving all 400 young delegates and ministers attending the Pre-COP26.

3 Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualising Contestation (CCC) was an international collaborative research project that surveyed 12,049 participants in 61 demonstrations in seven Western European countries (Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) between 2009 and 2012. https://protestsurvey.eu

4 The eight items in the political participation scale were: ‘contacted a politician, government, or local government official’, ‘signed a petition/public letter’, ‘donated money to a political organisation or group’, ‘worn or displayed a campaign badge/sticker’, ‘raised awareness for a political issue via social media’, ‘joined a strike (other than today's Climate Strike)’, ‘taken part in direct action (such as: blockade, occupation, civil disobedience)’ ‘taken part in a demonstration (other than today's Climate Strike)’. The eight items included in the lifestyle participation index were: ‘boycotted certain products’, ‘gave up a trip by plane for political, ethical or environmental reasons’, ‘deliberately bought products for political, ethical or environmental reasons’, ‘changed your diet for political, ethical or environmental reasons’, ‘consumed less products altogether for political, ethical or environmental reasons’, ‘reused products like bottles and plastic bags for political, ethical or environmental reasons’, ‘reduced energy use in your household for political, ethical or environmental reasons’, ‘bought second-hand goods (such as clothes, bikes, phones, etc.) for political, ethical or environmental reasons’.

5 The choice of items for the political scale was based on consolidated literature (Vráblíková 2014; Quaranta 2013; Hooghe and Marien 2013; Bazurli and Portos 2021; Pirro and Portos 2021). To build the lifestyle scale a similar logic was replicated, partially relying on the extant literature (Vitell and Muncy 2005; Stolle, Hooghe, and Micheletti 2005).

6 As addressed in the second section of the article, the politicisation and de-politicisation of lifestyle-centred forms of action is an object of debate and analysis in social science. The distinction between ‘political’ and ‘lifestyle’ forms of action that are used in the empirical section of this article does not imply denying the politicisation of lifestyle action that is, indeed, at the core of this work. For reasons of simplicity and brevity, the word ‘political’ is used here to identify collective claim-based forms of action, that fit the definition of politicisation as a process in which people mark something as political, moving an issue from the status of an individual private concern, which calls for individual private solutions, to that of a matter of a shared polity, which implies contention and deliberation (Luhtakallio 2012), in a more straightforward sense than individual lifestyle-centred forms of action.

7 Dummy values were also created for each European country where the event could have taken place as well as for the FFF event (March 2019 = 0; September 2019 = 1).

8 A dummy value was created for gender (1 = female, 0 = male). A categorical variable was created that measures job status (1 = full-time job; 2 = part-time job, 3 = student, 4 = unemployed, 5 = other), with being in a full-time job as the baseline category.

9 Three different five-point Likert scales were used to measure agreement (from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree’) with the following items: ‘children should be taught to obey authority’ ‘Government should redistribute income from the better off to those worse off’ ‘my participation can have an impact on public policy’.