In this guest post, Yi Hyun Kang discusses her research and findings of the recent article in Environmental Politics – Greta Thunberg and the transnational youth elite in global climate politics: myth or reality?
“Climate movement? Isn’t it a movement led by elite and privileged youth?”
When young people took to the streets to demand more ambitious and urgent climate action in the late 2010s, this question was quick to emerge. While public support for youth climate activism was widespread, criticism persisted, especially with the assumption that those involved did not represent youth more broadly. Greta Thunberg, who initiated the Fridays for Future movement, became a target of such critiques. But does such a ‘youth elite’ actually exist, and what are its implications for global climate politics?
In our recent article in Environmental Politics, Amandine Orsini and I address this question by employing the concept of elite as our analytical framework. We examine whether a transnational youth elite in climate politics can be identified and, if so, what it means for global climate governance. To do so, we identified highly active young individuals through international media coverage and official United Nations documents. We then compared three groups: youth prominent in the media (reputational elite), youth holding formal roles within UN climate institutions (positional elite), and youth frequently participating in UN climate conferences (decisional elite).
Our findings point to a clear conclusion: a unified transnational youth climate elite does not exist. The three groups – reputational, positional, and decisional elites – show minimal overlap. This suggests that global climate politics is not dominated by a handful of highly visible youth circulating across media and international institutions. Rather, a diverse and dispersed set of young individuals have engaged in climate politics over the years.
This raises a further question: even if there is no single transnational youth elite, do these groups nonetheless reflect socio-economic and demographic privilege?
Our analysis challenges this assumption. We examined the origin, gender, and age of individuals across the three groups. The results reveal significant variation, invalidating the idea of a uniform socio-demographic youth transnational elite in climate politics. While youth from Western Europe and other English-speaking countries in the Global North (e.g., the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) are overrepresented in the reputational group, youth from the Global South are well represented within the positional and decisional groups. Gender distributions also differ. Women constitute a large majority within the reputational group (83.33%), compared to the positional (56.09%) and decisional (42.00%) groups. In addition, individuals in the reputational group tend to be much younger than those in the other two categories.
At the same time, our findings do reveal persistent hierarchies. Disparities between youth from the Global North, particularly Western Europe and English-speaking countries, and those from other regions are pronounced in media visibility and UN conference participation. These patterns can be attributed to unequal media attention, disparities in material resources, and structural barriers such as visa access. Proficiency in English is also figured out as a key resource for participation in global climate politics.
Youth in climate politics is more diverse than the media shows
Public understandings of youth climate activism have been largely mediated through mass media. However, those most frequently featured do not necessarily reflect the full diversity of youth engagement. Our findings indicate that the reputational elite who are most visible in the media are less diverse than youth who actively participate in global climate politics. This selective visibility risks reinforcing simplified and potentially misleading representations.
This is problematic for several reasons. First, they may contribute to frustration among less visible youth whose contributions remain unrecognized. Second, the disproportionate focus on stereotyped youth actors, such as young women from the Global North, may shape perceptions of legitimacy and urgency in climate politics in unintended ways. Third, framing the youth climate movement as a narrowly defined phenomenon largely ‘elite’ or ‘feminine’ can undermine the power of youth in climate politics by reducing the potential of the movement to grow with wide support.
Our study is one of the first systematic efforts to analyze youth elite in global climate politics. In doing so, it highlights both the diversity of youth engagement and the structural hierarchies that shape visibility and participation.
Youth in global climate politics cannot be reduced to a simple distinction between elite and non-elite status. Rather, youth engagement reflects dynamic negotiation across multiple arenas of power. Greater attention to these dynamics would provide a more accurate account of youth climate movements and better recognize the contributions of those who remain less visible yet continue to advocate for more ambitious climate action.
Bio
Yi hyun Kang is a postdoctoral researcher at Lund University, Sweden, and an associate Fellow of the Academy of International Affairs NRW, Germany. From 2021 to 2023, she worked on the Youth Earth project at UCLouvain Saint-Louis – Bruxelles in Belgium. She is a political scientist whose research focuses on the role of youth, civil society, and artificial intelligence in environmental politics. More information can be found at <www.yihyunkang.com>.
