Convergence in action: framing the climate crisis at the 2021 Pre-COP counter-summit in Milan

ABSTRACT

With the emergence of Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, youth climate activism has attracted increasing attention. Climate strikes are part of a long trajectory of mobilizations for climate justice, rooted in global justice and environmental struggles. Although research on social movements has analyzed differences and continuities within these, there have been few systematic comparisons between youth climate strikes and ‘traditional’ climate justice marches. Our paper contributes to fill this gap. We focus on the framing of climate change in two different protest actions that took place in Milan, Italy, during the Pre-COP26 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2021: a climate strike by Fridays for Future, and a ‘traditional’ climate justice march by a wide coalition of actors. Relying on protest surveys and qualitative interviews, we discuss differences, similarities, and spaces for convergence among activists in these different fora, focusing on the framing of climate change, and on the meanings attached to ‘system change’.

KEYWORDS:

• climate movement
• Fridays for Future
• protest
• climate justice
• frames
• system change

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Interviewers received instructions and training for email address collection. They were deployed at several points along the march, moving from its end to the head, and from right to left and vice-versa in order to cover the whole. Interviewees collected email addresses at the beginning, during and at the end of the protests. All respondents were informed about the objectives of the research before providing their email address and gave their consent to answer the online survey. Minors under the age of 14 were excluded from the survey, in accordance with Italian law (D.Lgs. n. 196/2003 http://www.privacy.it/archivio/privacycode-en.html). All email addresses were encrypted and stored in password-secured devices. Responses were anonymized to make it impossible to trace a respondent from the e-mail address and were stored in password-secured devices.

2 The replication package for reproducing all analyses in Stata 14 is available: DOI https://zenodo.org/records/11196538.

3 This is however a frequent problem related to the refusal bias in protest surveys (Walgrave et al. 2016).

4 Regarding qualitative interviews, respondents were asked to provide explicit approval to be interviewed after reading the informed consent. All notes and recordings were stored in password-secured devices. The participants’ right to confidentiality was guaranteed during all stages of the research and we did not identify any risks from participating in this study.

5 See https://smileforfuture.eu/results/.

6 0 =  other levels of responsibility; 1 =  international responsibility.

7 0 =  non-systemic change; 1 =  systemic change.

8 0 =  other motivations; 1 =  social injustice.

9 1 =  man (ref.); 2 =  woman; 3 =  non-binary.

10 In years.

11 1 =  upper class/upper-middle class (ref.), 2 =  lower-middle class, 3 =  other.

12 We asked respondents to indicate in a multiple-choice question what type of organization they belonged to. Respondents were also asked to write the name of the organization. We then we “recoded” the open answers for the type of “environmental” organization, distinguishing between “climate organizations” (including Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion and local organizations that focus exclusively on climate issues) and “environmental organizations” (including Greenpeace, Legambiente, WWF, LIPU, and local organizations dealing with broad environmental issues). 0 =  no student union/organization member; 1 = yes student union/organization member. 0 =  no trade union member; 1 =  yes trade union member. 0 =  no climate organization member; 1 =  yes climate organization member. 0 =  no environmental organization member; 1 =  yes environmental organization member.

13 0 =  member of another organization; 1 =  not a member of any organization.

14 1 =  radical left (ref.), 2 =  left, 3 =  non-left.

15 1 =  climate strike (ref.), 2 =  climate justice march, 3 =  both protests. We provide a set of descriptive statistics with the variables used throughout (Table A3, Appendix).