Public consultations with youths
Many projects experimented with participatory democracy mechanisms involving youth, linked to local and international policymaking. They either reached out to youth-led organisations or built partnerships with organisations working with young people. For example, between 2022 and 2024, Destination Beauvais 2040 connected a formal “Council for the Future” with “future workshops” by and for citizens, including several focused on children and youths, “to engage directly with local decision-makers as equal partners.”
Similarly, La Crise dont vous êtes le héros in Nantes Métropole uses interactive climate scenario games to involve youths in municipal climate adaptation strategies, directly linking foresight to institutional resilience goals. In Slovakia, the Message Towards the Region project was “co-developed with the City of Nitra and the Council of Youth of the Nitra Region, anchoring the foresight work within local governance frameworks.” It facilitated structured dialogues with elected officials, addressing policy issues such as school curriculum reform by workshopping ideas with youths from the region. Through partnerships with municipal or regional governments, these initiatives fostered democratic dialogue with youths to help shape urban policies on themes such as climate, technology, education, and political reform.
These projects reveal a growing desire to change how policymaking and public governance recognize the value of youths’ proposals. The extent to which such proposals will be concretely implemented still remains to be seen.
Municipal climate adaptation strategies considering social context
Some initiatives within these public consultation contexts highlight the intersection of social justice and climate adaptation in metropolitan areas and the importance of reaching out to more vulnerable communities. Projects like Citadins, Citadines 2050 “engaged participants from both socially disadvantaged neighborhoods and local authority field agents… fostering dialogue across social divides” in order to understand how climate impacts are being perceived by communities who do not usually attend consultations in their own time. By reaching out and meeting with these communities on their own ground, it makes sure their perspectives are included into governmental climate resilience strategies. This approach supports institutional priorities for inclusive governance and equity in planning, all the while experimenting with more innovative approaches.
Top-down, climate governance and youth
Youth-led initiatives connected to global climate governance are examples of more formal political channels for participation. Local Conferences of Youth (LCOY) train young advocates in policy and advocacy, enabling them to articulate and present their visions for climate justice. LCOY also links youth advocacy directly to UNFCCC (UN Climate Change) negotiations, giving young people the opportunity to both build skills and bring their demands into formal political arenas.
The Emerging Horizons foresight process similarly integrates youth-generated futures into UN climate policy frameworks. Its report presents identified policy questions tailored for further action by UN agencies and youth climate leaders. These futures serve as examples of alternative ways to approach and frame the issues at stake.
Some institutions or funds have been working with movements or organisations who are active on the ground and who mobilize citizens, youths, from different parts of the world on questions of climate, especially in areas where local governments are not necessarily supportive of these initiatives. The Fearless Mural project at COP27 Egypt inserts/situates youth activism within the official UN negotiation space, creating a “perfect time for politics to come out from working behind closed doors… to see what is happening on the ground” (A Fearless Mural for the COP27).
Innovating, teaching and informing politics
Several projects focus on enhancing institutional abilities to engage with youth and civil society through foresight and participatory tools and vice versa. The EU-funded Imagining Climate-Just Futures initiative trained over 3,400 citizens across 12 countries and European partners to lead participatory scenario-building, embedding youth narratives in policymaking. The project description notes it is “combining participatory foresight, youth empowerment, and creative engagement to shape inclusive climate justice narratives”.
In Canada, Net Zero and You(th) empowers young people to “learn to critically assess government plans, track local climate initiatives, and ask better-informed questions as citizens” enabling them to be more informed and to adapt their language to a political context. This is also to encourage youths to engage in local or national democratic processes such as participatory budgeting and youth panels. An important point to highlight is that within these dynamics, youths are often expected to adjust their tone and style to fit political discourse if they want to be taken seriously.
Kijiji Cha Amani in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a conflict-affected region, engages communities through participatory “parachute mapping” to visualize the links between climate change, land use, and insecurity. These locally grounded narratives inform advocacy towards regional authorities and NGOs, pushing for integrated environmental and peacebuilding policies. These types of activities demonstrate how, in fragile contexts, collaborative governance, where citizens and communities align to address a problem, can complement formal political structures, when these prove unable to respond to citizens’ needs.
Bottom-up, activism and climate justice
Grassroots activism remains a vital force applying pressure to politics and political decisions for more ambitious climate policies. The link with policymaking here becomes about applying pressure. These initiatives are drivers of bottom-up political change. In Indonesia, Enter Nusantara campaigns in many different ways, by organising mass protests targeting banks still investing in fossil fuels, with the explicit goal to ban coal. The campaign’s outreach efforts (social media), has influence on policy debates and cultural perceptions around climate justice, all the while recruiting more youths in a national pressure movement.
Playing with new ways of linking citizens and politics
Le Théâtre des Négociations exemplifies an experimental approach to connecting citizens and politics by transforming the rigid format of international climate negotiations into a participatory, imaginative arena. Instead of mirroring traditional state-based delegations, the 2015 event invited 200 international students to a theatre in Nanterre (France) to a different kind of simulation: many of the students represented new kinds of (non-human) “actors” such as oceans, soil, youth, or the internet, entities usually absent from formal policy arenas but central to planetary life. By staging negotiations as a live, collective performance, it disrupted diplomatic conventions and allowed participants to test new alliances, rethink priorities, and generate bold proposals such as a legal status for climate refugees or a moratorium on Arctic mining. This experiment not only broadened the views on who and what gets represented in political decision-making, but also highlighted the potential of theatrical, creative formats to renew public imagination, foster collective agency, and bring long-term issues into the democratic sphere that need to be answered by taking in complexity.
From local, national, and international councils to citizen consultations and international climate negotiations, youths are recognized as essential political actors shaping just, inclusive, and sustainable futures. While institutions are adapting their processes to include and/or hear youth voices, and while young people themselves are demanding to be heard through activism and grassroots campaigns, it remains crucial to scrutinize how these mechanisms are implemented to ensure youths’ voices genuinely influence policy and proposals are acted upon.
For now, however, at the institutional level these initiatives often function more as knowledge pools than as drivers of concrete change, with relatively few proposals being piloted or adopted. This raises important ethical questions: how can we ensure that youths genuinely benefit from these consultations and that participation translates into meaningful impact?
→ We delve into what makes youth participation meaningful in Meaningful experience.