Give Us Our Future Back! The Voice of Citizens-in-the-Making on Climate Change and Democracy

[Subtitle: Analyzing the claims of the Youth for Climate movement in Belgium] Since January 2018, and following the call of the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, a new generation of climate activists has made a remarkable entry in the Belgian contentious landscape. The Youth for Climate (YfC) movement has attracted considerable attention for its far-reaching character (drawing tens of thousands of youngsters to the weekly protests) but also for expressing the indignation of an unexpected group of citizens (in the making): the youth. By claiming to speak for ‘their generation’, ‘their grand-children’, ‘the future’ or ‘the planet’, YfC is defying the common portrayal of the youth as apathetic or indifferent to politics, while at the same time pointing to one of the major failures of contemporary representative democracy, i.e. its inability to account for long-term challenges. As such, the movement is not only interesting from a new social movement point of view, it also challenges our understanding of political representation and citizenship today: who has the right to speak and act for whom? In the name of whom? In this paper, we seek to contribute to this debate by looking at one of the most contemporary cases of would-be citizens in action. With our analysis, we seek to provide a deeper understanding of who these youngsters are, what they seek to denounce and how they envisage their role, as citizens-in-the-making, in the broader political system. In particular, we ask the following empirical questions: why do they think the voice of future generations or nonhuman nature needs to be heard? How do they feel towards today’s representative institutions, and what do they mean when they call for a ‘system change not climate change’? Where should the solution come from? To start answering these questions, we conduct a two-level qualitative analysis. First, based on material collected from field work at protest actions and from the Facebook page of the movement, we analyze the representative claims (i.e. who the movement claims to speak for) of YfC. Here, we pay particular attention to the discursive repertoires that are mobilized in the production of such claims. Second, based on data collected by means of survey in January 2019 with participants to the climate protests (N= 576), we conduct a qualitative content analysis of responses to open questions; in particular those which focus on the youngsters’ denunciations, their motivations, goals and ideals. Here, we examine what kind of moral judgments they cast on the existing representative system and how they envisage the role of the political actors involved, including their own as citizens-in-the making. We attempt to draw various profiles from this analysis by looking at how the different types of denunciations or solutions may be attributed to socio-economic determinants such as age, the level of political sophistication or ideology. Finally, with this empirical contribution, we aim to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the meaning of political representation beyond electoral institutions and the evolving conceptions of citizenship.