European youth as consolidators of European leadership in international regime complexes? The cases of transversal environmental concerns

Abstract Environmental degradation is one of the greatest challenges faced by humanity, but the current global politics struggle to implement collective solutions. In this context, young people have recently entered the international political arena. Greta Thunberg, a young woman, attracted massive attention on climate change at UN conferences. Furthermore, many youth organizations are active. Since 2011, YOUNGO is the official youth umbrella group at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The Global Youth Biodiversity Network presents its views at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conferences. Also, major environmental non-governmental organizations are opening youth branches. While youth representation unfolds with unprecedented speed and scope, there is no comprehensive scientific knowledge of the formal participation of youth in international environmental negotiations. This paper aims to fill this gap, by precisely studying youth actors across parallel international negotiations, including biodiversity and climate change issues. In particular, because of its dynamism, this paper will focus on the role of European youth in these negotiation processes. Former research has suggested a leadership role of the European Union in international environmental governance in the format of regime complexes, and a key role of non-state actors more broadly in these regime complexes. Building on both branches of the scientific literature, we aim to study the specific role of European youth in furthering the European agenda in international environmental negotiations. As the first step of a four-year project on youth in earth politics, the paper proposes to present the results of the first systematic inventory of youth actors in the UNFCCC, CBD, and Sustainable Development Goals’ negotiations between 1992-2021. In particular, this database, together with social network analysis, enables to discuss European youth actors’ presence in different negotiation processes and their socialization in the international political game made of these specific international negotiations (climate, biodiversity and sustainable development). Are European youth actors active across different negotiations? Have they developed common spaces to discuss their formal political engagement across these fora? What characterizes them, compared to other youth actors? By answering those questions, the paper will shed light on the formal political engagement of European youth actors at the international level on environmental issues, and discuss to which extent they further the European Union’s agenda on climate change and biodiversity