Youth Participatory Mapping
Authors: Matt Baillie Smith, Nguyen Thi Xuan Hue, Laura Beckwith, Oliver Hensengerth
Children and young people are particularly susceptible to the impact of climate change. According to the World Health Organisation, children will suffer 80% of all illnesses, injuries and deaths occurring due to climate change, particularly in poorer and underserved regions of the world where climate change is already disrupting access to freshwater, sanitation, and food. This greater vulnerability of young people to climate change makes it important to build their resilience and to address both mitigation and adaptation. This means working with young people as agents of change, in addition to trying to understand their experiences. As UNICEF has pointed out, young people are key actors in raising awareness, running educational programmes, promoting sustainable lifestyles, conserving nature, supporting renewable energy, adopting environmentally friendly practices, and implementing adaptation and mitigation projects. This means we need to take young people’s diverse knowledge, ideas, experiences and hopes seriously, both in policy work but also in research.
This presents a starting point for the Living Deltas Youth subgroup, which is working with young people and youth organisations to do four things:
1) Understand the ways in which young people interact with their environment
2) Explore how young people frame environmental and climate change
3) Identify and analyse the diverse ways young people are engaged in organizing and charting a way forward for their delta regions
4) Identify opportunities for policy makers to learn from youth innovation and action in supporting locally-led adaptation and mitigation.
A lot of attention in academic and policy circles has focused on widely publicised climate action undertaken by youth in the global North. This means alternative approaches such as grassroots and locally-led initiatives are poorly understood, as are the actions and experiences of young people in the global South. To address this information gap, the Youth subgroup is mapping and identifying the broad range of activities young people do. These can range from merely participating in instrumental campaigns (e.g. cleaning up) to self-organized and self-directed ways of getting involved, building skills, and making a difference. In doing this, we aim to help shape debate and policy around processes of political and social change and the emerging role of young people in these processes, especially as they bring up big questions about the best ways for different stakeholders to respond to the climate crisis.
Against this backdrop, the Youth subgroup is currently developing a program of research in the Mekong Delta and will expand this work to Bangladesh later this year. Following initial site visits to An Giang and Soc Trang province in late 2020 and early 2021, we are now carrying out a series of stakeholder interviews with environmental NGOs and youth organisations in the Mekong Delta. Initial results have shown how young people are able to pioneer innovative sustainable environmental practices and discourses in their communities and places of work. At the same time, we found that young people do not have an easy time realising this potential as they often come up against social and political barriers. This is especially the case for young people from poorer backgrounds. These findings echo a 2017 OECD report on young people in Vietnam (Youth Well-being Policy Review of Viet Nam), which called for more youth engagement in civic and political activities and for the government to promote volunteering and NGO activities to help young people build soft skills, political awareness, and learn about leadership.
However, as we know from other work, volunteering and related activities need to be situated in their specific contexts; the impact of volunteering on both participants and outcomes is shaped by factors including gender, age, income and location. How young people experience delta living and changing delta environments is a key part of this jigsaw. To try and understand this, we are undertaking a series of participatory mapping exercises with young people. We are designing these to understand in more detail – through interactive and iterative work with young people – how young people experience environmental change in their spaces, how they relate to these changes in their daily lives, and how they envisage their future in deltaic landscapes. In this way, we aim to generate data that can help policymakers, stakeholders and communities themselves recognise and understand young people’s experiences and capacities, and engage them in more effective ways in building more sustainable delta futures.
