Information Exchange and Use in Polycentric Youth-led Climate Action

Abstract

Youth-led climate action is emerging as a direct reaction to decades of inaction in the policy arena for transformative policy change to a just and green transition to a low-carbon future. By connecting a variety of organizations such as environmental groups, faith groups, health groups, professionals, and unions, youth movements undertake self-organized collective action cooperating to change some institutions and devise new ones, resulting in a polycentric environmental movement. Today’s youth equipped with knowledge of how centuries of exploitation and systemic inequities have led to the climate crisis are more likely to be inclusive, diverse, and encompass new knowledge systems. Scholarship from environmental governance and social movements highlights the importance of scientific knowledge, local knowledge, Indigenous ways of knowing, and experiential expertise or citizen science as being salient, yet little is known about how youth groups share and use information from different knowledge systems for their activism. Interviews from two youth groups in the Greater Toronto Area in Canada reveal patterns in information sharing, the role of knowledge brokers, and information saliency. Results indicate youth actors frequently access not just scientific information through peer-reviewed journals, local information, and Indigenous ways of knowing, they also seek financial information such as budgets and investments of institutions and experiential expertise from local experts. In addition to credibility, salience, and legitimacy, youth groups also draw upon accuracy, an author’s positionality and informativeness and effectiveness of information to decide which information to include in their activism. Interestingly, even misrepresented science was an important type of information that young people draw upon to further their activism. Since many youth activists are still in college, a practical implication of this study is to expand the environmental studies curriculum to include courses on finance, fiduciary, business approaches, as well as different ways of knowing to help youth activists to legitimize their demands and obtain concrete victories.