Unlocking the Power of Youth to develop equity in net-zero governance

The Project

In partnership with the British Standards Institution, this project will bring youth climate justice representatives across six continents into international standard-setting processes to develop equity criteria for net zero governance. These criteria will be produced with UK-Plc to address the governance gap that fails to define how companies can address equity concerns when they decarbonise their footprints.

This project responds to a long-established yet engrained issue of how groups at different geographical scales and with differentiating power can engage in policy- and decision-making to address environmental challenges. The project therefore aims to:

• develop novel methods for bringing global youth’s expertise into climate governance
• demonstrate how youth and marginalised voices can be included in governance processes more broadly

Methodology

The project has three objectives:

• demonstrating the use-case for co-created youth inputs into net-zero standards, as a methodological model to improve procedural justice for other marginalised groups
• filling the equity-gap in net-zero guidance by embedding co-created, reward-oriented equity criteria to incentivise UK-Plc investment in global, systems-wide community-based projects
• improving the legitimacy and global applicability of net-zero guidance through the integration of non-European and non-hegemonic knowledges and priorities into the governance landscape

Our work will advance the uptake of social science methodologies by:

• developing international citizens’ assemblies literature by convening twelve youth across six continents. We will employ participant selection criteria that centre accessibility and diversity, and allow the focus of workshops to be participant-led
• engaging with methodologies that explore the challenges of bringing together actors in cross-sector, multi-stakeholder partnerships to effect systemic change. By placing the primacy of power on the youth coalition, and developing our and the BSI’s established trust-based relationships with corporates and standards bodies, we will demonstrate practical approaches for meaningfully bringing disparate groups together in a manner that recognises and directly addresses power imbalances between groups

By considering procedural equity in net-zero standard-making, our project will develop a new form of legitimacy and social licence by building on broad and deep engagement across demographics, geographies and practice. This project will test new methods for global consensus-building, providing a blueprint for future engagements by standards bodies and other social-science researchers.

We will convene youth and UK-Plc both online and in-person in the UK and at the Bonn Climate Change Conference in June 2025.

Guiding Principles

Our network aspires to convene youth, businesses and standards communities on equal footing. Participation will be structured to allow youth to guide the narrative of conversation, shifting the balance of power towards a group that traditionally experiences a high-barrier of entry in affecting change in the climate governance space.

Knowledge co-production undergirds all phases of our research and provides the motivating ontological framework. Being youth-led, and taking place over a series of 9+ workshops, our methods are deliberately reflexive and iterative, creating opportunity for existing assumptions to be put at risk, and shared conceptualisations to be built with learnings for all stakeholders.

Our environmental sustainability approach will be structured around ensuring the net-zero governance landscape can better deliver on scrutinising pledges and promises. The actual workshops will be convened online, and any in-person gatherings will be accessible by public transport.