Young people are among those most at risk from climate change. Recently, they have increasingly been organising across the globe and asserting their right to determine their own future by taking action against climate change (Thew et al., 2021). Although children and youth are among the primary target groups of educational science, their transnational networks have hardly been explored so far. At the same time, transnational networks are becoming increasingly relevant in education policy (Ball 2012; Ball & Junemann, 2012) and youth are being actively involved in global political processes by international organisations in order to make their voices heard (e.g., Secretariat of the UNFCCC 2013; Democracy Moves, 2021). In this study, we analyse the participation of youth in transnational networks on climate change. Among other things, young people use social media to make their demands heard. By becoming involved in transnational debates, youth are also increasingly participating in policy networks (Ball 2012; Ball & Junemann 2012). Such networks are characterised by various actors (institutional and individual) that form around education policy issues to influence policymaking processes. Although an increasing influence of youth has been observed in the context of climate change in particular, their involvement in such policy networks has been under-researched so far. We therefore address this research gap by examining network structures forming around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of States Parties. This study implements a mixed methods design based on social network analysis to analyse activities related to the participation of youth in international negotiations on climate change. We show that the participation of youth is, on the one hand, actively promoted by international organisations. On the other hand, youth form transnational social movements and explicitly oppose (inter)national organisations. Using social network analysis based on Twitter data, we show that youth from both the Global North and the Global South can be identified as being central in these transnational networks, with those from the Global South focusing on bridging between different groups. Our findings further suggest that previous approaches to participation are limited in their ability to explain transnational forms of youth participation, providing the integration of policy network theories as a necessary extension of existing theoretical approaches.

Ball, S. J. (2012). Global Education Inc: New Policy Networks and the Neoliberal Imaginary. London: Routledge. Ball, S. J., & Junemann, C. (2012). Networks, New Governance and Education. Bristol: Policy Press. Democracy Moves (2021). Walking the Walk: Prioritizing Youth Political and Civic Engagement in Renewing Democracy. Retrieved December 23, 2021, from https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5fd023409ea96b5f982e6c63/t/61af57ec288f4528f5cab584/1638881741797/Walking+the+Walk. Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2012). Climate Change Education as an Integral Part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Journal of Education for Sustainable Development, 6(2), 237–239. Thew, H., Middlemiss, L., & Paavola, J. (2021). Does youth participation increase the democratic legitimacy of UNFCCC-orchestrated global climate change governance? Environmental Politics, 30(6), 873–894.