Children’s engagement with environmental issues

Abstract

ABSTRACT This research offers insights into children’s engagement with the environment by exploring whether and how children demonstrate individual and collective engagement with environmental issues. Using a child-centered methodological approach based on individual interviews and drawings, this research shows that children express different levels of engagement with environmental issues, such that they demonstrate varying levels of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement. Our findings show evidence that individual (i.e. knowledge, interest and sustained attention, perceived responsibility, and behavioral control), as well as socio-contextual factors (communication within the family setting and outside, processes of (re)socialisation) foster or constrain children’s motivational states toward environmental issues. We conceptualize our findings to show children’s embodied engagement with environmental issues. From these findings, we provide managerial implications addressed to managers and policymakers.