Youth-Led Climate Justice Refracted through Local Lenses: A Comparison of SMOs in Cape Town and Philadelphia.

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 13: Movements as Transnational Processes

Abstract

This paper examines how youth-led climate justice organizations in Cape Town, South Africa, and Philadelphia, USA, operationalize the shared social movement frame of “youth-led climate justice” in the period following the 2019 global climate strikes. While 2019 marked an unprecedented surge in youth climate mobilization, much of the scholarly and public discourse has centered on Euro-American activists, obscuring the heterogeneous ways youth climate organizing unfolds across diverse local contexts. Drawing on 26 in-depth interviews, organizational media analysis, and extended participant observation, this comparative study analyzes two prominent social movement organizations (SMOs): Climate Change Changers (CCC) in Cape Town and GreenSpark in Philadelphia. Both organizations emerged from the global climate strike moment yet diverged significantly in their strategic priorities, organizational structures, and interpretations of climate justice.
Anchored in theories of social movement framing, world society diffusion, and social movement spillover, the paper argues that global climate justice frames—though widely circulated through institutions such as the UNFCCC—are locally refracted through distinct political opportunity structures, histories of racialized inequality, and organizational microprocesses. While both SMOs symbolically adopted the global protest repertoire of mass marches, they decoupled from it for different reasons: GreenSpark emphasized disruptive nonviolent direct action and member political education, whereas CCC prioritized peer-to-peer learning and contextualized climate justice as intertwined with neo-colonial extraction and land struggles. Organizational differences in remuneration, decision-making, and engagement with global climate governance further illustrate how shared frames mask substantial variation in practice.
By reinserting local organizational dynamics into analyses of transnational climate activism, this paper demonstrates that youth-led climate justice is not a singular global script but a dynamic, procedurally constructed set of practices shaped by local histories, capacities, and political imaginaries. In doing so, it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of youth climate organizing beyond the Global North.

Author

• Rehana Thembeka Odendaal, University of Pennsylvania