Youth climate activism: the Fridays For Future Rome experience

After Greta Thunberg started her protests in 2018, the Fridays For Future movement has restored visibility to climate change as a democratic issue, while inaugurating a novel wave of climate activism informed by a social justice perspective. Young peo- ple, especially teenagers, have been massively mobilising worldwide through the well-known Friday school climate strikes and the biannual global strikes, deployed across public squares and social media platforms. Studies on the Fridays For Future movement are still rare in Europe and do not yet provide a systematic analysis of the engagement strategies that make this movement unique and distinguish it from other youth and environmental movements. In this chapter, we attempt to fill this gap, inspired by the literature on digital media practices of grass-roots movements and studies on young people’s participatory culture and politics. We carried out an ethnographic study within the Fridays For Future Rome group between July 2020 and January 2021 as part of broader qualitative research, exploring how and where the movement’s young activists – who refer to themselves as the “Fridays” – mobilise, and highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of their engagement strategies. By moving across multiple environments (schools, public squares and social media), the “Fridays” effectively combine scientific training, mobilisation and networking actions, both online and offline. This array of activities supports the movement’s advocacy objectives – namely obtaining adequate climate-related policies from public institutions – while pursuing the engagement goals of encouraging and maintaining political participation in the movement. To attain the advocacy objectives, activists leverage and capitalise on adhesion to the movement, within a virtuous loop that nurtures the climate dispute as much as it does the affiliation to the movement. As for engagement, which is at the core of this contribution, there are two types of strategies: anchoring the “Fridays” themselves to the movement (“inward engage- ment strategies”), while involving external people in the fight against climate change (“outward engagement strategies”). In both cases, Fridays For Future’s grass-roots politics is mainly tailored to young people, since the climate crisis is thought of as linked to the rights of future generations who, more than anyone else, will pay its economic and environmental costs.