Youth Representation in Global Politics: Climate, Migration and Health Governance Compared
One-third of the world’s population is today under the age of 18. As their future will be impacted by on-going geopolitical changes, their voices in deliberations on critical transboundary issues, such as climate, health and migration, are increasingly called for. In the UN system children and youth have been identified as one of the “major groups” whose participation is critical to create effective, accountable and sustainable global institutions. In practice, however, the involvement of children and youth in matters of global governance remains contested. In this project we compare how, and by whom, young people are represented in contemporary global governance institutions and what the effects of such representations are in three salient domains; climate, migration and health. The project combines text analysis of key international policy documents, negotiation texts, policy briefs and position papers with participant observations and qualitative interviews across the three domains. While transformations of global institutions and the increasing agency of non-state actors are established themes in International Relations (IR), by focusing on children and youth as political agents, this project adds to an emerging research program on youth, IR and governance. The project builds upon a strong interdisciplinary research team with ample expertise from the global governance of climate, migration and health, as well as from IR and children and youth studies.
Final report
Purpose and implementation of the project
The aim of this project has been to critically examine and compare how young people are represented in the global governance of climate change, migration and health, and how these forms of representation shape the political subjectivities and policy agendas of youth in global politics. The project has built upon theoretical and empirical advancements in Global Governance studies, International Relations theory, and Child and Youth studies. Methodologically, it has combined qualitative and quantitative analysis of key international policy documents, negotiation texts, policy briefs, position papers with participant observations and in-depth interviews in conjunction with global summits in the domains of migration, climate and health.
Since the project started in January 2020, it has, with some adjustments, progressed according to plan. The project team has worked very well together, engaging in creative research collaboration across departments and fields of studies. The main changes to the project plan relate to the composition of the project team and the effects of the pandemic on data collection. Due to new employment conditions and delays in data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic, new team members were recruited and some research responsibilities needed to be reallocated. While the PI Jonathan Josefsson (Linköping University), together with the Co-PI:s Eva Lövbrand (Linköping University) and Anna Holzscheiter (Technical University Dresden) remained key researchers in the project, Eva and Anna had to lower their percentage of employment in the project due to new employment conditions. In fall 2019 project member Anna Kaijser left her employment at LIU, and two post-docs, Dr. Laura Pantzerhielm and Dr. Frida Buhre, were recruited in her place. Joel Löw was also recruited as research assistant to support data collection in 2022.
The project’s overall aim and research questions have proven to hold strong and to inspire productive research throughout the project period. The project team has met regularly to discuss literature, take stock on findings across the modules in the project and write together. As regards participant observation at global summits, however, our opportunities for on-site data collection were severely restricted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Several global summits were either postponed or moved online between 2020 and 2022. The group therefore had to experiment with digital ethnography and online interviews. While these methods allowed us to follow youth representation at a distance, the empirical material available was more limited than planned and data analysis was delayed. Despite the obstacles, the project followed the project plan in terms of number of interviews, document analysis and observations in conjunction with six global summits in the health, migration and climate domain.
Project results and conclusions
Overall, our results demonstrate how key international institutions governing migration, health and climate have experienced a major expansion, formalization and institutionalization of youth representation since the early 2000s. Young representatives are today acting as delegates, observers and activists, and use their constituency status to lobby governments, offer policy advice, make plenary interventions, and network with other civil society organizations across the three domains. Young people have benefitted from the opening-up of international institutions to other non-state constituencies (e.g. women, farmers, labour unions, indigenous peoples) who, for a long time, were considered to fall outside international politics. The growing visibility of young people in international institutions is, accordingly, indicative of how much these institutions have transformed from state-led, problem-specific instruments of governance towards forums for transnational exchange and debate.
When comparing the three policy domains, however, we were able to show that the nature and intensity of political representation – both in terms of access and meaningful participation – differs significantly between the domains. Variation can be explained by structural and practical conditions specific to institutional developments and political dynamics shaping the respective policy area. As our results show, it is also a consequence of differing intensity and strategies of political mobilization of children and youth themselves inside and outside international institutions.
Our results demonstrate that youth representation is a precarious act conditioned by the very structures and procedures of international institutions. The UN constituency system empowers youth as professional and responsible ‘insiders’, but also hinders more radical ‘outsider’ voices from being represented in the process. Young representatives experience a broad range of structural and practical barriers to exercise full and meaningful participation in global governance, such as impediments to obtain accreditation to global summits due to age restrictions and bureaucratic hurdles, lack of financial resources for travel, or language skills.
Finally, our results demonstrate how a more recent focus on youth as credible partners, future leaders and innovators feeds into discourses and institutional conditions of neoliberal internationalism and developmentalism. The emphasis on how youth can “become part of the solution” to global problems is particularly pronounced in adult-led, hybrid public-private initiatives and organizations.
New research questions
The project has generated new research questions and potential directions for future research. First, the results point to the need for methodological pluralism, comparative research, and historization to advance the field. While the range of qualitative methods employed in this project offers important insights into the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at play in youth representation in global governance, we see great potential in more systematic comparisons across domains of global governance and historical inquiries into the institutionalization of child and youth representation.
Second, we believe that future work on children and youth in IR would profit from extending our empirical gaze from ‘invited’ to ‘invented’ spaces of global governance. This could involve explorations of representational claims by young people who are either unable to gain access to global events or unwilling to participate because they reject the agendas and rules of interaction of international organizations. For example, more attention should be paid to anti-liberal strands of transnational activism (from both left and right wing groups) and the question of how some child and youth organizations, and networks contribute the widely noted illiberal backlash.
Third, given the inherently relational nature of young people’s in-betweenness as both ‘not yet’ and ‘no longer’, such a broadening of the research agenda would also need to incorporate intra- and intergenerational dimensions. How do youth mobilization and representation work through networks and collaborations of members within the same generation (intra), or between different generations (inter), occurring, for example, in parties, social movements, and other political organizations acting inside and outside of international institutions?
Finally, we believe that future research on child and youth representation will benefit from engaging with studies on the political economy of international institutions, global civil society and the expanding market of private-public partnerships. In light of the hyper-institutionalization of young people in global governance, we need to understand the competitive dynamics between different actors/networks claiming to represent youth and the ways in which these are fortified by access to economic resources, including funding through corporate actors, philanthropic foundations or state institutions.
Dissemination of research and collaborations
The results have been disseminated and communicated through presentations at a number of international academic conferences, workshops, seminars, and in peer-reviewed publications in the form of scientific journal articles, chapters in edited volumes and an edited special issue. We have exceeded the publication plan and published in total 14 papers, including a joint co-authored article. To ensure Open Access we have used budgeted funds in the project, internal university funding as well as external funding opportunities. Results have been made available to stakeholders and a wider public through the continuous participation in public panels, podcasts, blogs and news reporting.
Internally, the team has used digital tools to hold meetings and workshops online and put considerable efforts in organizing in-person workshops despite challenges presented by the pandemic. Externally, the members have disseminated results at international networks on children, youth and global politics. E.g. the international online workshop on Children, Childhood and Global Politics in April 2021, at panels on children, youth and international relations at the International Studies Association 2023 in Montreal and at the European International Studies Association in Potsdam 2023. Through the publication of the special issue, “The Politics of Child and Youth Representation in Global Governance: confronting international institutions” (Ed. Holzscheiter, Josefsson, Lövbrand and Pantzerhielm) for the journal Globalizations, the team has strengthened its international anchoring in the field. In the work with the special issue and to strengthen the internationalization in the project, The Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, has hosted three of the authors as guest researchers for a period of 3-6 weeks. The international references group has been involved in preparations of field studies, exchange of literature and peer-reviewing.
The aim of this project has been to critically examine and compare how young people are represented in the global governance of climate change, migration and health, and how these forms of representation shape the political subjectivities and policy agendas of youth in global politics. The project has built upon theoretical and empirical advancements in Global Governance studies, International Relations theory, and Child and Youth studies. Methodologically, it has combined qualitative and quantitative analysis of key international policy documents, negotiation texts, policy briefs, position papers with participant observations and in-depth interviews in conjunction with global summits in the domains of migration, climate and health.
Since the project started in January 2020, it has, with some adjustments, progressed according to plan. The project team has worked very well together, engaging in creative research collaboration across departments and fields of studies. The main changes to the project plan relate to the composition of the project team and the effects of the pandemic on data collection. Due to new employment conditions and delays in data collection during the COVID-19 pandemic, new team members were recruited and some research responsibilities needed to be reallocated. While the PI Jonathan Josefsson (Linköping University), together with the Co-PI:s Eva Lövbrand (Linköping University) and Anna Holzscheiter (Technical University Dresden) remained key researchers in the project, Eva and Anna had to lower their percentage of employment in the project due to new employment conditions. In fall 2019 project member Anna Kaijser left her employment at LIU, and two post-docs, Dr. Laura Pantzerhielm and Dr. Frida Buhre, were recruited in her place. Joel Löw was also recruited as research assistant to support data collection in 2022.
The project’s overall aim and research questions have proven to hold strong and to inspire productive research throughout the project period. The project team has met regularly to discuss literature, take stock on findings across the modules in the project and write together. As regards participant observation at global summits, however, our opportunities for on-site data collection were severely restricted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Several global summits were either postponed or moved online between 2020 and 2022. The group therefore had to experiment with digital ethnography and online interviews. While these methods allowed us to follow youth representation at a distance, the empirical material available was more limited than planned and data analysis was delayed. Despite the obstacles, the project followed the project plan in terms of number of interviews, document analysis and observations in conjunction with six global summits in the health, migration and climate domain.
Project results and conclusions
Overall, our results demonstrate how key international institutions governing migration, health and climate have experienced a major expansion, formalization and institutionalization of youth representation since the early 2000s. Young representatives are today acting as delegates, observers and activists, and use their constituency status to lobby governments, offer policy advice, make plenary interventions, and network with other civil society organizations across the three domains. Young people have benefitted from the opening-up of international institutions to other non-state constituencies (e.g. women, farmers, labour unions, indigenous peoples) who, for a long time, were considered to fall outside international politics. The growing visibility of young people in international institutions is, accordingly, indicative of how much these institutions have transformed from state-led, problem-specific instruments of governance towards forums for transnational exchange and debate.
When comparing the three policy domains, however, we were able to show that the nature and intensity of political representation – both in terms of access and meaningful participation – differs significantly between the domains. Variation can be explained by structural and practical conditions specific to institutional developments and political dynamics shaping the respective policy area. As our results show, it is also a consequence of differing intensity and strategies of political mobilization of children and youth themselves inside and outside international institutions.
Our results demonstrate that youth representation is a precarious act conditioned by the very structures and procedures of international institutions. The UN constituency system empowers youth as professional and responsible ‘insiders’, but also hinders more radical ‘outsider’ voices from being represented in the process. Young representatives experience a broad range of structural and practical barriers to exercise full and meaningful participation in global governance, such as impediments to obtain accreditation to global summits due to age restrictions and bureaucratic hurdles, lack of financial resources for travel, or language skills.
Finally, our results demonstrate how a more recent focus on youth as credible partners, future leaders and innovators feeds into discourses and institutional conditions of neoliberal internationalism and developmentalism. The emphasis on how youth can “become part of the solution” to global problems is particularly pronounced in adult-led, hybrid public-private initiatives and organizations.
New research questions
The project has generated new research questions and potential directions for future research. First, the results point to the need for methodological pluralism, comparative research, and historization to advance the field. While the range of qualitative methods employed in this project offers important insights into the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion at play in youth representation in global governance, we see great potential in more systematic comparisons across domains of global governance and historical inquiries into the institutionalization of child and youth representation.
Second, we believe that future work on children and youth in IR would profit from extending our empirical gaze from ‘invited’ to ‘invented’ spaces of global governance. This could involve explorations of representational claims by young people who are either unable to gain access to global events or unwilling to participate because they reject the agendas and rules of interaction of international organizations. For example, more attention should be paid to anti-liberal strands of transnational activism (from both left and right wing groups) and the question of how some child and youth organizations, and networks contribute the widely noted illiberal backlash.
Third, given the inherently relational nature of young people’s in-betweenness as both ‘not yet’ and ‘no longer’, such a broadening of the research agenda would also need to incorporate intra- and intergenerational dimensions. How do youth mobilization and representation work through networks and collaborations of members within the same generation (intra), or between different generations (inter), occurring, for example, in parties, social movements, and other political organizations acting inside and outside of international institutions?
Finally, we believe that future research on child and youth representation will benefit from engaging with studies on the political economy of international institutions, global civil society and the expanding market of private-public partnerships. In light of the hyper-institutionalization of young people in global governance, we need to understand the competitive dynamics between different actors/networks claiming to represent youth and the ways in which these are fortified by access to economic resources, including funding through corporate actors, philanthropic foundations or state institutions.
Dissemination of research and collaborations
The results have been disseminated and communicated through presentations at a number of international academic conferences, workshops, seminars, and in peer-reviewed publications in the form of scientific journal articles, chapters in edited volumes and an edited special issue. We have exceeded the publication plan and published in total 14 papers, including a joint co-authored article. To ensure Open Access we have used budgeted funds in the project, internal university funding as well as external funding opportunities. Results have been made available to stakeholders and a wider public through the continuous participation in public panels, podcasts, blogs and news reporting.
Internally, the team has used digital tools to hold meetings and workshops online and put considerable efforts in organizing in-person workshops despite challenges presented by the pandemic. Externally, the members have disseminated results at international networks on children, youth and global politics. E.g. the international online workshop on Children, Childhood and Global Politics in April 2021, at panels on children, youth and international relations at the International Studies Association 2023 in Montreal and at the European International Studies Association in Potsdam 2023. Through the publication of the special issue, “The Politics of Child and Youth Representation in Global Governance: confronting international institutions” (Ed. Holzscheiter, Josefsson, Lövbrand and Pantzerhielm) for the journal Globalizations, the team has strengthened its international anchoring in the field. In the work with the special issue and to strengthen the internationalization in the project, The Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, has hosted three of the authors as guest researchers for a period of 3-6 weeks. The international references group has been involved in preparations of field studies, exchange of literature and peer-reviewing.