‘Who is going to talk about my grandad? Who is going to talk about me?’: Spatial politics in the advocacy of youth from the MENA region at COP 27

ABSTRACT

In this article, we focus on the advocacy of youth from the Middle East & North Africa (MENA) region in the U.N. COP process through interviews (n = 12) with youth from the MENA region who participated in or organized around the 2022 COP 27 climate negotiations in Egypt. The perspectives of youth climate advocates in the region are relatively absent in the existing scholarly literature and there is a significant need for additional research about youth climate advocacy beyond the activism of white, western and wealthy young people (see Neas, S., Ward, A., & Bowman, B. [2022]. Young people’s climate activism: A review of the literature. Frontiers in Political Science, 4. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.940876). Through thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews (n = 12) supplemented by context drawn from digital media about youth climate advocacy in the MENA region, our findings characterize the: (1) priorities and claims; (2) perceptions of influence and participation; and (3) motivations for and challenges to youth climate advocacy across the region. We argue for intersectional analysis of youth climate advocacy in the COP process and beyond and describe the importance of examining the uneven spatial politics of climate change and transnational youth advocacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate politics
• youth activism
• Middle East & North Africa
• COP 27
• climate justice

1. Introduction and theoretical background

1.1. Introduction

In 2012, governments met in Doha, Qatar for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COP 18 negotiations. COP 18 represented the first time that a COP was held in a Gulf country, second in the Middle East and North Africa region (abbreviated: MENA) after COP7 in Marrakesh, Morocco. Taking place at the tail end of the Arab Spring, the Doha COP featured a climate march through the streets of the city, reportedly the first ever such climate demonstration in Qatar or in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (see Democracy Now, 2012; Global Call for Climate Action, 2012).^1,2 According to journalist John Vidal (2012), the march featured about 100 youth activists from the incipient regional network the Arab Youth Climate Movement (AYCM) who pressed MENA governments to take a leadership role in the negotiations throughout the conference, sporting a banner that read ‘Arabs; Time to Lead’.³

Fast-forward to COP 27, held in 2022 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt a decade after COP 18. With the last two COP conferences – COP 27 and COP 28 – taking place in MENA countries and an emerging generation of youth climate advocates across the region building new platforms such as the MENA Youth Network, it is a timely opportunity to analyse the advocacy of young people from the region in the global policy process. To this point, most scholarly attention to youth climate advocacy has been trained on Global North originating movements such as Fridays for Future (FFF) best known for coordinating the School Strikes for Climate (see Neas et al., 2022). Scholars and advocates are calling for broader conversations about youth climate advocacy that better include the voices and efforts of young people in most impacted regions to ‘understand how young people around the world are interpreting and responding to environmental concerns’ (Walker, 2020, p. 1).

In this article, we examine the advocacy of young people from the MENA region in the COP 27 negotiations through semi-structured interviews (n = 12) with MENA youth advocates who attended and organized around COP 27. We supplement this analysis with background information regarding MENA youth participation in previous COPs and digital media reflecting on MENA youth participation at COP 27. We show the value of intersectional analysis that attends to the dynamic spatial politics that shape and fracture youth climate advocacy within and beyond the COP process.

1.2. Conceptual background: intersectional analysis of youth advocacy at COP

This manuscript builds on the thought leadership of youth activists alongside scholarship on transnational youth climate mobilizations, youth advocacy in the COP process, and intersectional environmental analysis. As documented and analysed in works by Foran et al. (2014), Foran et al. (2017), Thew (2018) and Thew et al. (2020) youth advocates have been formally engaged in the U.N. climate policy process for nearly a decade and a half now through the constituency YOUNGO – a formal group within the U.N. climate process that coordinates international youth participation – exercising political agency and working to highlight dimensions of climate justice in the international policy conversation (for a comprehensive review of the role of nonstate actors and constituencies in UN climate governance, see Kuyper & Bäckstrand, 2016). Scholarship on youth climate advocacy experienced a landmark moment in 2018 with the emergence of the School Strikes for Climate. Media and scholarly attention moved quickly to chronicle the motivations of a new generation of youth advocates, along with the rhetoric, organizing strategies and characteristics of emerging national and transnational youth mobilization networks such as FFF (see Eide & Kunelius, 2021; Holmberg & Alvinius, 2020; Pickard, 2022). While there are examples of scholarship highlighting the voices of youth from Global South countries (see Eide & Kunelius, 2021 for example), much of the existing research on youth climate advocacy is limited in its scope by a ‘disproportionate focus on activism in the global North and in wealthy and white communities, a focus on mass mobilizations and an intensive interest in the individual activist Greta Thunberg’ (Neas et al., 2022, p. 1).

There is a significant need for scholarship focused both within and beyond the COP process that characterizes the longer and more geographically variegated climate organizing of young people who fall outside of the white and ‘WEIRD ’ – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic – categories to deepen understandings of youth climate advocacy in its many forms and geographies (the ‘WEIRD’ acronym is from Chang, 2022; drawing on Henrich et al., 2010; see also Walker, 2020). Within the COP process, greater attention is needed to the unique and differential experiences and perspectives of COP formed by young people from different contexts, particularly youth from contexts most impacted by climate change. Research by Grosse and Mark (2020) and MacKay et al. (2020) offer models for this work, providing insights from the experiences of Indigenous youth COP participants that deconstruct dominant framings of ‘youth’ as an undifferentiated category. Such uncritical framings of ‘youth’ neglect the ‘wider context of intersecting categories of oppression and marginalization’ that differentiate young peoples’ experiences at COP and beyond (Bowman, 2020, p. 1) and contribute to what Bullon-Cassis (2021) describes as the ‘structural (in)visibility of BIPOC youths in global climate summits.’ This in turn yields conversations and outcomes that minimize the experiences, stories and demands of youth from most impacted communities.

In addition to scholarly calls for broader engagement with youth climate advocacy beyond ‘WEIRD’ geographies, many youth climate activists are calling for framings that centre the lived experiences of young people on the frontlines of climate impacts. As described by youth climate activist Disha Ravi (2021), the transnational movement FFF uses the phrase MAPA – Most Affected Peoples and Areas – as a way of shifting the focus towards ‘people who are most affected by the climate crisis’ and more present-oriented and historically-informed visions of climate justice (See Nakate, 2021 for similar calls for a ‘bigger picture’ of youth climate activism). Children and young people in the Global South face intersecting injustices of climate and environmental breakdown as the ‘worst-affected victims of resource degradation and environmental pollution’, necessitating that their voices be central in defining global climate justice pathways (Bajracharya, 1994, p. 41).

Activists’ calls for intersectional climate justice framings and ‘intersectional environmentalism’ (Thomas, 2022), connect with longstanding work in environmental justice scholarship demonstrating the analytical importance of concepts of ‘positionality’ and ‘intersectionality.’ Pulido and Peña (1998, p. 33) define positionality as ‘one’s location within a larger social formation’ and note that positionality influences ‘how one experiences an environmental problem.’ Relatedly, ‘intersectionality’, developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), can be usefully applied to climate justice and activism analyses as the framework ‘allows one to deconstruct the complex web of political, economic and cultural processes that produce sets of privileges and oppressions, thus painting a clearer picture of the resulting inequalities’ (Mikulewicz et al., 2023, p. 4). Intersectional analyses and attention to positionality offer ways to untangle and illuminate how axes of oppression – such as gender, race, age and geography – converge to shape the unique climate activisms of groups of young people differently positioned in social, political, environmental and spatial structures. We think with positionality and intersectionality as critical concepts for theorizing and understanding the activism of youth climate advocates in the MENA region and mapping the intertwined geographical and generational injustices they articulate and resist.

1.3. Thinking spatially and regionally: insisting on place in the uneven spatial politics of transnational youth climate advocacy

The reassertion of place thus appears as an important arena for rethinking and reworking Eurocentric forms of analysis – Escobar, 2001, p. 141

We need to … represent and to talk more about the experiences of youth from the Global South … we have our own stories to tell. We have our own experiences, our own perceptions of nature … We need this local vision from the South …  (Interview 2)

This study builds on the existing literature on youth climate advocacy within and beyond the COP process by offering a regional perspective on MENA youth engagement in COP 27 that is underrepresented in the existing scholarship. Thinking with intersectional modes of climate justice analysis, our work insists on greater attention to spatial politics for enhancing understandings of youth climate advocacy. We trace how dynamic conceptions of space, place, and scale (e.g. region) are central to the demands, motivations, claims and aspirations mobilized by MENA youth climate advocates at COP 27. We also draw on this approach to illustrate how youth advocates understand the broader transnational youth movement in terms of uneven affordances and attention structured by spatial politics.

We think about place and spatial politics through the lens of geographically informed scholarship on social movements and the politics of place. Escobar’s (2001) foundational work identifies construction of place as a key element of social movements’ political strategy. Amidst globalization, insistence on place as a relevant scale and site of possibility offers theoretical and political opportunities which move beyond theorizations that oppose the abstract ‘global’ to the expense of the textured ‘local’. Escobar’s work is informed by the thought of geographer Doreen Massey, whose relational conceptions of space, place and scale emphasize that space is ‘always a product of interrelations’, that ‘local’ and ‘global’ are not oppositional categories but co-constitutive, and that spatial arrangements and politics are dynamic and processual (Escobar, 2001, p. 165). For Massey, place is best understood as ‘meeting place’, a site at which different stories, relations, itineraries and trajectories intersect (Massey, 1994). Leitner et al. (2008) frame the importance of spatial thinking for understanding contentious politics. Specifically, they identify ‘scale, place, networks, positionality, and mobility’, as key domains through which struggles over discursive and material power take shape. As they write ‘in the course of these struggles new scales are constructed, and the relative importance of different scales is reconfigured’ (Leitner et al., 2008, p. 159). According to our framework, the ‘MENA region’ that advocates interviewed here often speak about is not a pre-constituted scale of action, but a horizon of political possibility, a ground for dynamic spatial claims-making, and a way of reconfiguring who, what and where matter in the international politics of climate.

In the context of a growing interest in transnational or global modes of youth climate advocacy, we believe that this paper demonstrates the importance of attending to the spatial politics that youth climate advocates articulate and how they mobilize constructions of space, place, scale and positionality both to articulate climate justice claims and critiques of dominant narratives of transnational youth advocacy. What these analytics bring to the scholarly conversation on youth climate advocacy, is an attention to the relational construction of scales of action (e.g. region), a sense of space/geography as an axis of inequity, and an insistence on difference and unevenness across transnational networks.

In addition to the critical-analytical potential of thinking explicitly about spatial politics in youth climate advocacy, thinking regionally in this paper offers a useful lens for a few reasons. Many countries across what is generally categorized as the MENA region share economic, political, demographic, environmental and climate profiles. Demographically, young people up to the age of 25 comprise almost half of the population of the MENA region and currently experience among the highest rates of youth unemployment in the world (UNICEF, 2019). The MENA region is facing already dramatic and escalating climate impacts shaping everyday lives (Greenpeace Research Laboratories, 2022; U-Report, 2022) but also experiencing a growing context for environmental advocacy shaped by concerns and political formations that emerged in part from the crucible of the Arab Spring (see Loschi, 2019; Moneer, 2020; Sowers, 2018; Zayed & Sowers, 2014) and also shaped by longer local, national and regional histories of intersectional environmental resistance (see Abu-Rish, 2015; Arefin, 2019). Politically, Josua and Edel (2021, p. 586) describe an overall ‘return of repression’ across the MENA region in the decade following the Arab Spring uprisings, characterized by autocratic or authoritarian regimes that deploy tactics ranging from crackdowns on protest to internet cutoffs, censorship, and digital surveillance.

Among the most important reasons for the regional framing in this article is that institutions and advocates appear to be adopting regional frames. Many of the climate initiatives sponsored by the UNFCCC, such as MENA Climate Week, are scaled at the regional level and youth advocates have long been and continue to organize in regional networks, from the younger MENA Youth Network to the Arab Youth Climate Movement that has existed since 2012 (see Shafi, 2022a).

2. Project design and methodology

We are a team of co-authors with a diverse range of academic, research, and advocacy experience across the Global North and South. We adopt an approach grounded in youth political geographies frameworks in which we aim to understand young peoples’ political experiences in their own terms as a way of characterizing youth political agency (see Holloway et al., 2018; Kallio & Häkli, 2013). As a corrective to ‘top-down understandings of young peoples’ political engagement’, we follow Bowman’s (2019, p. 295) call to ‘build theory from young people’s visions of social, economic, and political change in response to climate emergency’.

This project draws on n = 12 semi-structured, virtual interviews with MENA youth climate advocates from ten countries across the region. Our interviews featured a purposeful sample of youth advocates from the MENA region who attended and/or organized around the COP 27 climate negotiations. Purposeful sampling allows for the ‘identification and selection of information-rich cases related to the phenomenon of interest’ and is commonly applied in qualitative research (Palinkas et al., 2015, p. 1). We utilized an interview-based approach to develop qualitatively ‘thick’ accounts that contribute to ‘understanding interpretations, experiences, and spatialities of social life (Dowling et al., 2016, p. 680).

Our interview participants were all from the MENA region, actively engaged in civil society networks and advocacy efforts, engaged in the COP 27 negotiations or COP process more generally, and under 35 years of age. They were selected based on searches through the webpages of regional youth advocacy networks by our study team and through previous connections, thus they may represent some level of bias. Interviews followed the guide included in Appendix 2 and occasionally included follow-up, clarifying questions and additional questions on a case-by-case basis. This research was approved by the IRB of the Pennsylvania State University (IRB Study 00021548) and interview subjects indicated informed consent through signing a consent form. Interviews have been anonymized to protect the privacy of respondents and provide a space to speak openly about the process and parties involved. We supplement these interviews with publicly-available reflections on COP 27 and other instances of MENA youth engagement in the COP process, including blog posts by youth advocates and media interviews featuring youth advocates from the region, to present vital background information about the longer history of MENA youth participation in COP. We organized our analysis of the data and presentation of the results around the following three research questions:

• RQ1: What types of priorities and claims do youth activists from the MENA region highlight in their advocacy in the U.N. climate policy process?

• RQ2: How do youth advocates from the MENA region understand their participation and level of influence in the COP process overall, and in relation to youth climate advocates from other contexts present at COPs?

• RQ3: What types of motivations for and challenges to climate advocacy do youth climate activists across the region describe?

We analysed our dataset in the MaxQDA qualitative analysis software, utilizing thematic analysis. As Holmberg and Alvinius (2020, p. 84) explain, thematic analysis is a method that aims to ‘formulate themes’ across a qualitative dataset via coding, evaluating and categorizing data, allowing researchers to develop meaningful insights about datasets that can speak to research questions and objectives (Holmberg & Alvinius, 2020, p. 84; citing Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 10). We generated themes in an iterative and emergent fashion based on the collective portrait painted by the data and highlight key thematic findings in the following sections. We include illustrative interview quotations to preserve the words of youth climate advocates to the extent possible.

Potential limitations of the study include the generalizability of our sample and the sample size, both limited by the requirement that participants must have attended COP 27 or previous COPs and that all participants had working knowledge of English. Our purposeful sample features a narrow and potentially non-representative group of young people engaged on climate issues in the region. While this was a small-scale study intended as an entry point for our study team, it nevertheless provides a critical basis for future research both on the advocacy of MENA youth in the COP process and broader studies of grassroots youth climate advocacy across the region.

3. Results and analysis

RQ1: Priorities and Claims of MENA Youth Advocates at COP 27

3.1. Priorities: representation and inclusion of MENA youth as an advocacy priority

Among the key priority areas of many of the advocates we spoke to were accessibility and inclusion concerns, specifically increasing the representation of MENA youth in the COP process, lowering barriers to MENA youth participation in COP, and scaling up youth climate awareness and advocacy in their home countries. Advocates looked to platforms like social media to share educational materials, build visibility, and highlight challenges and opportunities for their work and initiatives (Interview 1; Interview 4; Interview 6; Interview 7).

One longtime COP participant and head of the Arab Youth Sustainable Development Network notes a broad ‘lack of participation among Arab youth in COP negotiations compared to other regions of the world’ with the exceptions of COP 18 in Qatar and COP 22 in Morocco (Hassan, 2022). Despite its location in Egypt, some commentators in the region levelled the same criticism of COP27, where access was limited due to burdensome visa processes, funding limitations, paucity of badges for MENA youth, and prohibitively expensive lodging prices (Shafi, 2022b). Language barriers, specifically the lack of educational materials and resources on the climate negotiations in Arabic and scarcity of translators in the conference centre, also formed obstacles to inclusion of MENA youth at COP 27 (Interview 3; Interview 8).

While such barriers to conference participation and engagement are notable and persistent across time, several advocates we spoke to did view the participation of MENA youth at COP 27 as an improvement compared with previous COPs, attributing it to the COP being in the region. One advocate described how before COP 27 they felt ‘overlooked … not just because the region itself didn’t have a focus, but also it was so hard for many people from our region to make it to other conferences’ noting that her civil society organization was able to bring a substantial delegation to COP 27 (Interview 7). Several advocates spoke positively of Tunisia’s efforts to involve youth in the formal negotiation process through its national youth delegation (Interview 7; Interview 8). Tunisia brought what Altaeb and Chibani (2023) describe as a ‘large, vocal youth delegation’ that they argue ‘not only amplified the voice of Tunisian youth on a world stage, but it also acted as an investment in the future’ (see Abdelmoula, 2022 for a first-hand perspective from the Tunisian youth delegation).

The Tunisian youth delegation is representative of a broader dynamic we noticed. Several interviewees spoke of the desire to work in closer partnership with their national governments to enhance meaningful youth participation in the COPs as part of party delegations (Interview 2; Interview 5; Interview 7; and Interview 8). For instance, one advocate from Yemen spoke of the ‘need to collaborate with our governments’ to ensure the meaningful inclusion of youth voices at COP 28 (Interview 5). But for youth engaged with closely with both their national delegations and civil society, this was not without its complications. One interviewee described the experience of being ‘stranded in the middle of two worlds’ as someone closely engaged with her national delegation and with civil society networks (Interview 7). This collaborative orientation towards government authorities may distinguish our sample from advocates who are more antagonistic towards government authorities. However, it may also reflect calculated decisions on the part of youth advocates to maximize their influence in the political operating environments across the region, as one of our interviewees suggested (Interview 12).

3.2. Claims: framing climate justice and youth as solution builders in the MENA region

Asked about key priorities or topical areas within the negotiations and outcomes of COP 27, interview responses were primarily focused on climate change adaptation (Interview 2; Interview 11), loss and damage (Interview 1), capacity-building (Interview 6), and developing global climate justice frames inclusive of the MENA region (Interview 11).

When mitigation and the question of fossil fuel production did emerge in our interviews, it was generally with an emphasis on historical responsibility (Interview 2), the geopolitics of fossil fuels, and of subverting dominant geopolitical narratives of the region and its youth. As one respondent said:

Yes, the Middle east is one of the biggest exporters of oil, but also Europe and the U.S. are importers of oil … If you weren’t the people buying we wouldn’t sell it … But then the Global North comes to the Global South and tells them you’re the problem, but they’re also part of the problem. It’s a lot of hypocrisy (Interview 7)

Another respondent echoed this assessment: ‘Every time we talk about the MENA region the only challenge the entire world sees is oil, the use of oil … but they forget that we can propose climate solutions’ (Interview 1). This reframing of youth in the region also resonates with the work of the Arab Youth Climate Movement a decade ago. As one organizer with the AYCM told Climate Home News at COP 18 of their network’s emphasis: ‘We thought it was really important to bring Arab youth voices … Arabs are more than oil. We actually quite care about climate change, and we are here to make a change’ (Climate Home News, 2012).

We also heard textured views of how oil economies connect with everyday senses of local futures and development pathways: ‘I don’t think the way people think about it is like it’s all evil … Every parent, if you talk to anyone, they’re going to say: if we stop selling right now … we’re all going to go hungry … it’s very complicated’ (Interview 7). One respondent, however, did put it this way, speaking critically of a tree planting initiative promoted by Saudi Arabia:

Why are they portraying planting trees as a solution in our region? The real solution in our region is stopping the greenhouse gas emissions from their source. It’s not planting trees to take off the carbon and leaving every country digging more fossil fuels (Interview 4)

RQ2: Understandings of Participation and Perceptions of Influence Among MENA Youth at COP 27

3.3. Varieties and understandings of youth participation: (Contested) spaces of youth engagement at COP 27

COP 27 was billed as the most youth-inclusive to date. Notably, this was the first COP to feature a dedicated Children and Youth Pavilion.⁴ There was significant celebration of the pavilion by U.N. agencies, such as UNDP which described it as one of the key successes of COP 27, and COP 27 as a moment in which ‘the journey to effective [youth] inclusion has begun’ (United Nations Development Program, 2023).

Several of our respondents expressed positive views about the Children and Youth Pavilion. Many felt that it represented a genuine space of dialogue and interchange among transnational groups of youth participants, policymakers, and COP officials. One interviewee described how the Pavilion ‘stood out’ from the rest of the COP, highlighting the artistry of youth participants as a source of inspiration (Interview 1). For others, the space offered critical networking opportunities and served as an energizing setting for many young people to congregate (Interview 5).

However, other interviewees raised more critical views about youth engagement at COP 27. One respondent wondered whether the highly visible youth representation at COP 27 was partly ‘tokenistic’ (Interview 7), and another interviewee had concerns that the image of COP 27 as youth-inclusive was meant to seek ‘approval from Western countries’ and may ultimately have been superficial (Interview 8). We would hear and see the term ‘youth-washing’ in some of our interviews with advocates and in advocates’ writings about COP 27. One interview respondent defined the term this way:

I’m always afraid of youthwashing, that is to use youth merely as like “okay we are consulting with youth” but I mean effectively there is like no progress in terms of the implication of youth in this decision-making process. We want to be part of the decision-making process, not just to consult us or to say “okay that’s a good percentage of youth on the national delegation” … there’s a difference between just mere participation to say, “okay, there’s youth” and effective and real participation (Interview 2)

Shafi (2022b) in a set of reflections on COP 27 for the Middle East Institute, described the Youth Pavilion as a ‘one-stop hub for “youth-washing” for global leaders and celebrities alike’. He makes the case that despite the public image of COP 27 as a youth-friendly conference, many young people ‘feel that governments and big companies are using them to look good without really listening to what they have to say’. This sentiment was echoed in interviews: ‘Seeing the biggest polluters … Coca-Cola, Shell, and so on supporting young activists … it was a bit paradoxical for me’ (Interview 2).

3.4. Perceptions of influence: representation, power, and the uneven politics of youth visibility at COP 27

Several of our interview respondents noted the relationships between the dynamics of youth-washing and the rise of celebrity youth climate activists. Discussing the rise of celebrity youth climate activists, one respondent told us ‘some people have endless power that they don’t have the right to, because we are all equal’, suggesting a perceived imbalance of influence or representational power in relation to youth advocates from other contexts (Interview 11). This advocate described the problem of COP as one of ‘political will’ in contrast to ‘representation’ and urged a sharper attention to power dynamics at COP in general, but also within transnational youth climate networks. Relatedly, another advocate noted the broader trend of ‘individualization’ of climate activism and how this led to an uneven opportunity structure for youth COP participants:

You have to found something. You have to start something. You have to be very active on Instagram. You have to be doing the work that’s out there. And a lot of the work that happens behind the scenes, all of the systems change work. The movement building work is often not supported …  (Interview 12)

That digital platforms and social media visibility were becoming preconditions for COP opportunities, for this interviewee, was ‘very dangerous for the movement’ and helped to partially explain perceived barriers to COP influence and visibility on the part of youth advocates in the MENA region who may face restricted access to such platforms.

In addition to concerns around tokenism, youth-washing, and inequitable attention, there was a tension at COP 27 between the open programming of the Children and Youth Pavilion and the tight restrictions on protest and activism at the COP. One advocate called the surveillance environment at COP 27 ‘dystopian’ (Interview 8), while another mentioned surveillance concerns surrounding the use of the COP 27 digital application meant to help participants navigate the conference (Interview 10). Youth from the MENA region, one interviewee felt, were especially aware of and subject to this surveillance in comparison to those traveling from other regions:

They [MENA youth] were really anxious about what would happen to them in their countries if they went out of the boundaries … They would say ‘yeah Europeans are leaving the country.’ They will go back to their countries. Nobody will do anything to them but what will happen to us? (Interview 4)

This experience illustrates that young people participating in the COP process have unique and different experiences based on their positionalities and intersecting identities that can directly shape how advocates engage within the COP setting.

RQ3: Motivations for Climate Advocacy and Challenges Facing Youth Advocates in the MENA Region

3.5. Motivations for climate advocacy: lived experiences of climate change, interwoven climate pasts and futures

Across our interviews, advocates mentioned how their lived experiences of drought and water scarcity (Interview 2), extreme heat (Interview 10), and wildfires (Interview 1), among other climate impacts, motivated their activism (see also Connect4Climate, 2016). One subject described seeing how her Dad’s experience ‘as a farmer suffering from water scarcity’ made climate change ‘very personal’ (Interview 2). Advocates we spoke to also emphasized conflict as an important dimension of the climate problem, noting the difficulty of engaging the public around climate change given the everyday emergencies people were facing in conflict-affected contexts and countries facing political instability (Interview 5; Interview 6; Interview 9; Interview 11).

The titular quote of this article reflects the interconnections drawn between past and future concerns of climate impacts. In longer form, this interviewee described her motivations for climate advocacy at the COP by weaving together visions of a warming future with her grandfather’s story of health struggles:

He was the inspiration behind me … he had chronic dehydration because of the weather in Egypt, and because it was hot to the point where it made him permanently paralyzed … And just thinking about how much he was struggling because of climate change … Am I going to have to go through that as well? Am I going to have to see another loved one in my life go through that as well? … So if it’s not us who are going to be speaking about these struggles, then who will? … Who is going to talk about my granddad? Who is going to talk about me? (Interview 10)

Place-based, historically dense, lived experiences of climate impacts are mobilized by MENA youth advocates in the COP space as grounds for their advocacy, suggesting a sense of climate future that is profoundly influenced by past and place.

3.6. Challenges facing MENA youth climate advocates

Across our interviews was echoed the perspective that MENA youth movements were less networked to one another, to funding and media opportunities, and to national governments in comparison to movements in other regions. This sense of disconnection for advocates manifested in a variety of experiences. One respondent mentioned that several MENA countries did not appear to have visible pavilions, or presence, in the COP conference space while others like UAE and Egypt had strong public presence even in the more informal spaces of the COP, giving the impression that these countries were less committed to climate action (Interview 9). Another interviewee observed a lack of coalitional politics across the region, saying ‘everyone is doing a one man show’ (Interview 4) while another described a sense of disconnection: ‘most of us [MENA youth advocates] didn’t know each other and it was weird because we were all in COP and didn’t meet’ (Interview 1).

These senses of disconnection and discontinuity occurred across both time and space. For example, returning to the AYCM formed in 2012, one of our interviewees who was involved in building that network reflected on why it didn’t ‘continue and scale and grow as a movement in a global North perspective’ attributing this largely to differences in political systems and advocacy environments and offering a contextual explanation:

Something far more interesting happened, which is those young people, if you kind of track their process today, and if you see them also still be engaged in COP 27. Many of them are new negotiators. Many of them are consultants for negotiators and doing climate policy in different ways. Many of them are innovators in their fields when it comes to being scientists, marine biologists, ecologists, and it's them being engaged in the wider system. I think in the MENA context which is more, I think, realistic and feasible for them to continue their work because MENA activism is not very well funded or supported (Interview 12)

Institutional attention to and support of climate activism in the region has been evanescent. An interviewee from Jordan highlighted that many MENA youth can only afford to attend COP once due to the lack of sustainable funding for participation (Interview 8). He added that the presence of COP 27 and 28 in the region has increased the number of institutions which are contacting him for partnerships, but often with little long-term follow through (Interview 8) suggesting that the attention driven by COPs to initiatives in the region can be transitory, but important for advocates.

3.7. Motivations for attending COP: connecting and constructing MENA as a space of climate advocacy

Describing participating in a gathering of youth climate activists in Milan in 2021, one subject recounted her motivation for launching a regional youth network as follows:

When we went there, we realized that a lot of people from other regions, so like people from the Global North or Europe, the Americas, Africa, they knew each other … There was a community going on, on other continents, and we didn’t have that in our region. And so, we decided we wanted to be the people who would create this community or this hub to jumpstart climate action (Interview 7)

Most interviewees agreed that hosting COPs in the MENA region created unique opportunities for regional organizing, capacity building, and unlocking important funding and connective opportunities. Meetings in the region would mean ‘Youth in the region will do more, funding will flow for civil society in the region more and movements in the region will be more active’ (Interview 4). Many of our interviewees were optimistic about COP 28 in Dubai as an important regional organizing opportunity. One respondent described COP 28 as the ‘perfect place and perfect country to link the MENA region together through something’ and that this regional connection would lead to solutions-thinking (Interview 1). Asked about their hopes for COP 28, other interviewees affirmed regional connection as a key desire. Phrases like ‘interregional collaboration’ (Interview 7) and ‘awareness’ (Interview 4) came up regularly, and many emergent youth networks in the region are actively working out how to get more MENA youth in attendance and at negotiating tables (Interviews 7 and 8). COPs have the potential to create both short-term and lasting impacts in their host cities in ways that often go unacknowledged. For instance, one of our interviews mentioned that short or long-term environmental job opportunities may blossom from a country hosting COP (Interview 4).

4. Discussion

4.1. (Re)writing a regional story: interrogating the spatial politics of youth inclusion in the global climate narrative and global climate policy process

Writing for the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy blog, Altaeb (2022) describes the climate activism of MENA youth as ‘silenced ’ – a framing that refers to the minimal resources of youth climate movements in the region, limited continuity of networks, and the lower visibility of these movements in comparison to movements geographically rooted in the Global North (see also Arab Youth Center, 2021). As we heard throughout the project interviews in a few different ways, ‘in every country you can probably find 100 Greta Thunbergs in the Global South. But, of course, their stories are not highlighted’ (Interview 12), suggesting interlocking regimes of representational power and uneven spatial politics.

Based on our interviews and contextual data, we argue that the spatial politics of youth climate advocacy – how youth advocates mobilize and reconfigure conceptions of space, place, and scale – are central to shaping and understanding the uneven landscape of youth advocacy both within and beyond the COP process. Our findings suggest that the COP 27 youth delegates we interviewed from the MENA region, as well as previous longstanding regional movement networks such as AYCM, adopt a strategic regionalism in framing their objectives, articulations of justice, motivations, and ambitions. As political geographers would argue, regions are continuously constructed rather than given, and the making of the region by MENA youth activists is an important spatial political manoeuvre. For our interviewees, place-based stories, and attention to the uneven spatial politics of youth climate advocacy and the stories told about global youth activism mattered deeply in their motivations for activism, conceptions of uneven influence across transnational networks, barriers to access, and visions of COP 28 in Dubai. As the titular quote of this article suggests, youth advocates from the region feel that their concerns will be left out of the conversation if they are not making the region matter in spaces of global deliberation like COP. The writing of youth advocate Shafi (2022a) puts a finer point on how turning to the region is a form of a resistance to a global narrative that erases particularities of place. As he (2022a) writes in a commentary piece for the Middle East Institute, ‘there are some disparities masked by the glossy big picture in the global climate movement’ which gain importance because

when future generations talk about the youth climate movement, it will not be the story of a single narrative and will make it clear that youth taking to the streets to protest climate change inaction is not the only way forward for climate activism.

This claim encapsulates a critique of the global narration of youth climate advocacy, the tactical preferences it privileges, and the very real and material spatial politics it sets in motion. Moreover, our findings linking the AYCM’s enunciations with our COP 27 interviews suggest that this sense of regionalism is not altogether new, but resurgent, forming an enduring organizing in MENA youth climate activism. The existence of other strongly regionalized youth climate networks, such as in the Pacific, suggest that attention to the spatial politics of youth climate movements may be a fruitful avenue of further scholarly inquiry.

Descriptions of the unevenly felt surveillance environment at COP 27 as well as challenges securing visas, illustrate how place may be carried with certain COP participants and felt more acutely by those facing marginalization in relation to citizenship and nationality. Where certain COP attendees may have a seamless experience of international mobility and unhampered participation, others may face barriers at each step and feel as though they are isolated in relation to broader youth fronts. There are various forms of spatial politics that operate within the COP process, from the scale of individual bodies to the entire conference venue, from the spatial separations of civil society and official negotiations in the conference venues themselves, to the spatial-political claims that different actors bring to the COP conversation. The data presented here also point to the importance of COP as a ‘place’ itself, in Massey’s (1994) sense of a ‘meeting place’: a setting where stories converge in time and space and trajectories influence one another, a ‘local’ in which the ‘global’ temporarily takes visible centre stage. This came through most clearly in how youth advocates described COP 28 as an opportunity to build a regional consciousness and to channel resources, support, and awareness to civil society networks active across the region.

Our findings add to scholarly accounts of ‘youth-washing’ too. Quoting Duraiappah (2015), for instance, Charles and Jameson-Charles (2022) describe the occurrence of ‘youth-washing’ in the various processes which have emerged at the edges of global meetings and governance processes to incorporate youth voices and how these processes generally favour the perspectives of ‘urban, educated, and often privileged young people’ and fail to be ‘representative of the broader youth community’ (Charles & Jameson-Charles, 2022; quoting Duraiappah, 2015). Taft’s (2020, p. 11) research elaborates the trend towards ‘individualization’, describing how advocates like Greta Thunberg are made into ‘celebrity girl activist figures’ by being ‘reimagined as singular heroes’ and separated from the broader movement contexts, histories, and cycles of struggle in which they exist. The trends of youth-washing and individualization seem to occur hand in hand in the case presented here, in the discursive homogenization of an actually heterogenous youth population and in the narrow politics of representation that take place at international meetings. Urban, educated and comparatively privileged would seem to describe many of our interviewees, raising questions about the extent to which even marginalized youth activists in spaces such as COP represent the interests of heterogenous youth populations in their countries and communities and concerns surrounding the potential co-optation of youth elites (notably, this co-optation of youth voices was a concern expressed by Interviewee 8). Overall, this contribution suggests the importance of theorizing and attending to the spatial politics of youth climate advocacy and intra-movement critiques more explicitly and systematically than existing research has.

5. Conclusion

In this study we present an intersectional analysis that is attentive to the spatial politics of youth climate advocacy to examine the demands and claims of youth climate advocates from the MENA region at COP 27, the motivations for and challenges facing youth climate advocates across the region, and how MENA youth advocates present at COP 27 perceived their influence and roles in the COP as well as in relation to a larger, global youth movement. There have been fluctuations in the levels of this participation throughout the decade, but, from the emergence of the Arab Youth Climate Movement surrounding COP 18 in 2012, to the quickly growing landscape of new organizations like the MENA Youth Network today, young people have and continue to work regionally to generate shared platforms on climate issues.

Young people from the MENA region bring unique intersectional and situated perspectives to the COP which are important to amplify, and which may broaden conceptions of climate justice to better reflect the everyday concerns of youth in the MENA region. The scenes, the spaces, sites and stories that young people from the MENA region and elsewhere articulate in the COP deserve closer attention, as they reveal profound insights about the uneven spatial politics of climate change and youth organizing around climate.

The data and analysis presented here point to the need for further research on youth climate advocacy across the MENA region, grassroots and civil society movements for climate action, the local impacts of COP and other environmental summits, and research involving larger and more representative samples of youth in the region beyond those who participate in the international climate negotiations. While youth climate advocacy in the MENA region may not resemble mass mobilizations in the West, it is happening, and can offer instructive insights for both climate justice frameworks and discussions of youth climate politics today.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consortium for Social Movements and Education Research and Practice, The Pennsylvania State University [Grant Number Seed Grant Award].

Notes on contributors

Mark Ortiz

Mark Ortiz is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. His research program focuses on transnational youth climate activism and climate justice frameworks.

Charles Mankhwazi

Charles Mankhwazi is a researcher and consultant based in Kampala, Uganda with experience conducting youth-led research that informs priorities in policy and decision-making.

Neeshad Shafi

Neeshad Shafi is an environmentalist, speaker, and social change advocate based in Doha, Qatar. He is the Co-Founder of the Arab Youth Climate Movement Qatar.

Notes

1 Since 2012, one additional COP has been held in a MENA country: COP 22 in Marrakesh, Morocco. There have also been COPs in Nairobi (COP 12, 2006) and Durban, South Africa (COP 17, 2011).

2 For the purposes of this paper, we categorize MENA according to the regional groupings of the UNFCCC (see United Nations Climate Change, ‘Party Groupings’). Based on the regional party groupings active in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change international policy process, we include the following countries in our categorization of the MENA region: Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Mauritania, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

3 For the purposes of this paper, we understand ‘youth’ as a category encompassing people under 35 years of age. Many definitions of youth adopt a cutoff age of ∼24, however we derive our categorization of ‘youth’ from that used by the YOUNGO youth constituency that has been coordinating youth participation in the UNFCCC process since 2009. YOUNGO’s definition of youth is inclusive of people under 35 years of age (see United Nations Climate Change, ‘YOUNGO’), and utilizing YOUNGO’s categorization aims to ensure that our contribution is consistent with other scholarship on youth engagement in the UNFCCC process and reflects on the age range generally understood as youth in the U.N. climate process.

4 The Children and Youth Pavilion included 14 youth-led organizing partners: The African Youth Initiative on Climate Change, Fridays for Future, Global Alliance of Territorial Communities. Indigenous Youth Caucus, IAAS, International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations, Loss and Damage Youth Coalition, Mock COP, SDG 7 Youth Constituency, SIDS Youth AIMS Hub, UNFPA, The Secretary-General’s Youth Advisory Group on Climate Change, YOUNGO, and Youth4Nature.

The Institutional Organizing partners included: Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Save the Children, The African Union, UNICEF, Greenhouse, and Race to Zero (Children and Youth Pavilion). According to the Youth Envoy for the COP 27 Presidency, substantial funding came from the Children Investment Fund Foundation (Makary, 2022).

Appendices

Appendix 1. Table of interviews

Table

Interview Identifier	Age	Country	Attended COP 27?	Gender (M/F)
Interview 1	21	Algeria	Y	F
Interview 2	26	Tunisia	Y	F
Interview 3	25	Tunisia	Y	F
Interview 4	32	Lebanon	N	F
Interview 5	26	Yemen	Y	M
Interview 6	26	Yemen	Y	M
Interview 7	22	Iraq	Y	F
Interview 8	27	Jordan	Y	M
Interview 9	Under 35	Egypt	Y	F
Interview 10	19	UAE/Egypt	Y	F
Interview 11	27	Sudan	Y	F
Interview 12	34	Bahrain	Y	M

Y = Yes; N =  No; M = Male; F = Female.

Appendix 2. Interview guide

Interviews were semi-structured and centred around the following list of questions with follow-ups, clarifying questions, and additional questions asked on a case-by-case basis.

1. How old are you and where do you call home/where are you currently based? Is this place different from your country of origin?

2. How did you first learn about climate change? when and how did you first become active on the issue?

3. Do you currently work with any climate change organizations? If so, are these organizations local or international?

4. What are the key issues affecting your area?

5. Was this your first COP or have you participated in multiple COPs?

6. Have you ever received any capacity building prior to engaging in COP negotiations? If yes, describe your experience?

7. What was your role in the negotiations (e.g. party negotiator, civil society observer)?

8. What climate change topics/thematic areas were you most interested in following at COP27? Why these topics?

9. What do you think is the importance of having young people at the COP and as negotiators?

10. Could you describe your participation in the latest COP 27 UN Climate negotiations? What were some of the experiences that stand out from participating in the negotiations?

11. How could you describe the environment for youth activism or protests at the recently held COP 27?

12. Do you think that young people in general have influence in the space of the COP?

13. Did you feel that youth from the MENA region were well represented? Why or why not?

14. Are you satisfied with the outcomes of the negotiations or do you think more needs to be done?

15. It seems that youth party delegate programmes in the MENA region are growing, what are your thoughts on this development?

16. In your opinion, what more could be done at the next COP in the UAE?

17. What do you think are the key priorities for climate change policy in your home country, your region, or internationally?

18. Is social media relevant to your organizing? If so, how? How did you use social media at COP 27? What platforms?

19. Did you feel that the media coverage of the COP paid enough attention to MENA youth?

20. As someone who has participated in a number of COPs, has your view of the process changed?