Sustainable societies: How to harness youth anger for planetary health

Key takeaways:

• Youth anger about climate has not always been channelled by government in productive ways.
• Women Deliver has sought to address this through leadership programs and other means.
• Young people should be engaged early in the policymaking process so that they have a meaningful influence.

The planetary health emergency is mounting and young people are disproportionately the ones ringing the alarm.

The crisis has minted a cadre of youth eager not just to alert people to the dangers that a deteriorating natural environment poses to both the planet and to individuals, but to actually lead efforts to address the issue. The problem is that their meaningful participation is not always welcomed.

Luke Spajic, a research student at the University of Adelaide, found himself disappointed after attending two recent conferences addressing planetary health. “There was a real lack of taking people’s voices seriously and giving youth opportunities to contribute to things, besides and in addition to their work in the streets,” he said. “We’re used as an example of why things should happen, but not necessarily included in making them happen.”

Working with four colleagues, Spajic set out to draft a call to action for the planetary health community, encouraging it to find ways to draw on young people’s expectations and experiences. Instead, they ended up drafting recommendations, published in [The Lancet Planetary Health](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(19%2930172-X/fulltext), that they hope will help act as a guide for meaningfully engaging young people in the emerging planetary health field.

Young leaders change the systems they participate in, leading to more diversity and more just outcomes within their community

Engaging young people is a time-consuming, potentially expensive process and before institutions, organisations and movements take it on, they may need to understand its benefits. Fortunately, Women Deliver — one of the organisations Spajic and his co-authors looked to as an example — has this covered.

“Engaging young people should not be done only for the benefit of young people,” said Tamara Windau-Melmer, the senior manager for youth engagement at Women Deliver. “It’s so much larger than that. Programs and policies will be better and adults and policymakers have so much to learn.”

The organisation has been encouraging youth participation since its first conference in 2007, before launching its Young Leaders Program in 2010. Women Deliver staff work with youth on leadership skills and give them a platform to share their advocacy.

Guided by these experiences, Women Deliver has also dived into the work of explaining the importance of meaningful youth engagement. Alongside the long-term benefits to the actual participants, young leaders also change the systems they participate in, leading to more diversity and more just outcomes within their community. Women Deliver even map the economic benefits to companies who hire people schooled early in leadership, including encouraging better performance and reduced absenteeism from their employees.

Understanding the importance of meaningful youth engagement might be easier than the work of actually making it happen.

The first step is structured systematic consultation with young people that ultimately moves beyond just hosting advisory bodies to include a broad, diverse selection of youth

As Spajic and his co-authors originally set out to draft their call to action, they discovered the work of Roger Hart. An expert in environmental psychology and human development, Hart wrote the seminal text on youth participation for the United Nations Children’s Fund in 1992. In it, he introduced a concept called the “ladder of participation.”

It begins with three categories of manipulative and tokenistic engagement, which can include some forms of social mobilisation, and then climbs through five levels of participation, reaching a point where youth make shared decisions with adults. Hart wrote that the failure to reach this level was “not the absence of a desire to be useful on the part of teenagers. It is rather the absence of caring adults attuned to the particular interests of young people.”

In constructing their own model for meaningful youth engagement in planetary health, Spajic said the team of writers drew on Hart’s ideas to identify a set of practice points that explicitly seek to understand and encourage young people’s interests. Because efforts to protect planetary health are relatively nascent and the climate change movement has not always modelled meaningful youth participation, they buttressed their recommendations with examples drawn primarily from other fields.

Their first step is structured systematic consultation with young people that ultimately moves beyond just hosting advisory bodies to include a broad, diverse selection of youth. It has to be more than training, but actual opportunities to help guide the development of the planetary health movement. Otherwise, there is the risk that young people eager to participate will grow frustrated.

That means organisers must remove barriers so young people can actually participate. These are obvious hurdles, like providing financial resources so youth are able to attend meetings, but also less tangible barriers.

Within planetary health, most institutions are new, so it offers an opportunity to include young people right from the beginning

Spajic pointed to perceptions that might limit youth involvement, including the idea that a person is required to have a number of years of experience for their point to be considered valid. These perspectives can manifest in actual barriers to entry, including donors who refuse to give grants to young people to enact their visions of change because they lack a track record of handling donor money. Women Deliver created a program to provide grants to their Young Leaders so they can build this experience.

Spajic and his team identified ongoing monitoring and data collection on youth engagement as a third step – something Women Deliver highlighted as a key weakness even among programs that do attempt to practice it. Spajic said this might look like actually counting how many young people are in the room when decisions are made and tracking how their ideas and perspectives influenced those decisions, but he said, ultimately, it would be important to actually include a broad range of young people in any discussions about what constitutes meaningful civic engagement and how it is measured.

This is critical not just for internal accountability, but also for achieving the fourth step, which is building a stronger evidence base about the impact youth engagement can have on planetary health.

Spajic said that he and the other authors are now using their positions within various organisations and movements to encourage organisers to take up their recommendations. “Within planetary health, most institutions are new, so it offers an opportunity to do it right from the beginning,” he said.

Windau-Melmer said this is crucial: “The biggest lesson learned for me is that in so many people’s work as they try to engage young people, they’re doing it too late. Young people need to be engaged at the beginning of the ideation and discussion so they can be a part of moulding the path forward.” — Andrew Green

Further reading

Meaningful Youth Engagement

(Picture Credit: Unsplash)