Navigating Justice: Children and Youth Participation in Climate Litigation

Focusing on the growing role of children and young people in climate litigation, this study raises key questions about the implications of judicializing climate justice. What does this legal avenue enable, and what does it constrain, particularly in terms of children's rights and the political representation of children? How do judicial frameworks accommodate—or fail to accommodate—the heterogeneous, lived experiences of children facing environmental devastation, including the particular temporality of childhood? We explore how young litigants perceive and navigate the slow, often protracted nature of legal processes, and what notions of “victory” and “defeat” mean in the context of climate justice. Preliminary findings from the Youth Climate Justice (YCJ) project, based on interviews with child litigants, their legal representatives, and judges, reveal that while children are gaining visibility and agency within legal arenas, these processes can also be disempowering. For some, the judicialization of climate justice represents a necessary tool for pushing forward environmental rights. For others, the slow pace and abstraction of legal outcomes stand in contrast to the urgent, emotional, and deeply felt nature of the climate crisis. Drawing on holistic and critical perspectives that emphasize the complex, embodied, and situated experiences of children within the current climate crisis, this research thus interrogates the potential and limitations of framing environmental justice in judicial terms, while probing how legal systems can—or cannot—respond to the deeply temporal, emotional, and intergenerational dynamics of children’s experiences of climate change.