Children’s Climate Citizenship In Times of Polycrisis: Agency, Participation, and Sustainable Futures

Children’s Environmental Citizenship in Times of Polycrisis: Agency, Participation, and Sustainable Futures

Contemporary societies face interconnected crises including climate change, environmental degradation, armed conflicts, forced migration, social inequalities, and digital transformations. While children are often seen as vulnerable victims, childhood studies highlights their agency, participation, and capacity for social transformation.

This open session explores children’s environmental citizenship as a lived and relational process examining how children engage with environmental issues, negotiate responsibilities, express political concerns, and shape sustainable futures through everyday practices. Moving beyond formal citizenship, it emphasises children as political actors in the present across diverse social, ecological, cultural, and digital contexts.

Drawing on acts of citizenship (Isin, 2008), lived citizenship (Kallio, Wood & Häkli, 2020), and everyday environmental citizenship (Firinci Orman, 2022), the session explores how citizenship emerges via care, activism, participation, learning, community life, and more-than-human relations. It addresses environmental justice, intergenerational relations, inequality, belonging, and future imaginaries amid uncertainty.

We welcome empirical, theoretical, methodological, and practice-based contributions from diverse geographical and socio-political contexts, including comparative perspectives across the Global North and South, urban and rural settings, Indigenous territories, and conflict-affected regions. The session aims to advance understandings of children as active agents in ecological and social change toward more just and sustainable futures.

Firinci Orman, T. (2022). Youth’s everyday environmental citizenship. Childhood, 29(4), 495–511.

Isin, E. F. (2008). Acts of Citizenship. London: Zed Books.

Kallio, K. P., Wood, B. E., & Häkli, J. (2020). Lived citizenship: Conceptualising an emerging field. Citizenship Studies, 24(6), 713–729.