Moral power of youth activists – Transforming international climate Politics?

Abstract

Youth Climate Activists are important norm entrepreneurs as humanity is increasingly awakening to the realities of accelerating climate change. They push for seeing climate change not merely through cost-benefit analysis frames but through frames of multiple climate justices. But how successful have these activists been in shifting perspectives in the context of international climate politics? This paper aims to investigate (1) to what extent the normative framework advanced by this movement is increasingly penetrating the international public climate debate, changing arguments, priorities, and frames around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and (2) the key actors pushing for normative change. Using a unique and comprehensive Twitter dataset for the period between 2014 and 2021 revolving around the annual UNFCCC COP conferences and major youth climate protest events we combine various computational methods, including transformers-based topic modelling and social network analysis in this study. We find that indeed the normative framework advanced by the movement has successfully penetrated the discourse around UNFCCC and that youth climate activists were able gain support from central actors outside the movement, which is further contributing to the diffusion of their normative framework. We conclude that while these results demonstrate the moral power of youth climate activists, more research is needed to understand the influence on the actual negotiations outcomes