Exploring youth activism on climate changedutiful, disruptive, and dangerous dissent

If you're seventeen years old and you understand the science of climate change — really understand it — and you've watched every formal channel fail, what do you do next? The honest answer is: it depends entirely on what kind of power you think you're up against. That question, deceptively simple, is exactly what Karen O'Brien, Elin Selboe, and Bronwyn Hayward set out to map in their 2018 paper in Ecology and Society. Their framework doesn't just describe what young activists do; it explains why different activists make such radically different choices. The paper's core move is to reframe youth climate action as dissent — a deliberate word. O'Brien and colleagues define dissent as "a conscious expression of disagreement with a prevailing view, policy, practice, decision, institution, or assumption that is exacerbating climate change." That definition does real work. It insists that what young people are doing when they organize, protest, or quietly build alternative economies is an act of political judgment, not just an emotional response. It opens up a much wider range of expressions to study — including quiet, everyday forms of resistance that don't show up in news footage. Why does this focus matter right now? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections the authors cite are worth considering. A child born in the year two thousand is likely, by two thousand fifty, to live in a world with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations somewhere between 463 and 623 parts per million — compared with roughly 400 parts per million in two thousand sixteen. A world that is between 0.8 and 2.6 degrees Celsius warmer, shared with between 8.4 and 11.3 billion people. The decisions being made today in the rooms that young people are largely excluded from will shape those numbers. That exclusion — being offered token or decorative roles at forums rather than real influence — helps explain why so many young people end up turning elsewhere. Before getting to the typology itself, O'Brien and colleagues are careful about what they mean by "youth." They use the United Nations definition of 15 to 24 years old but emphasize that youth is also a social and developmental category — a time of expanding capacities, shifting identities, and openness to new ideas. What shapes whether young people engage, and how, comes down to three things the authors identify. First, framing: messages that present climate change as imminent catastrophe tend to produce despair and disengagement, while more constructive framings invoke hope and agency. Second, inclusion: tokenistic or managed participation can be just as discouraging as outright exclusion, pushing youth either into withdrawal or into alternative spaces. Third, digital platforms: social media enables surveillance and self-censorship, yes, but it also supports logistical coordination, information distribution, and what the authors call e-movements — forms of collective action that simply didn't exist for previous generations of activists. Now for the typology. The three types — dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous dissent — are not a hierarchy. They're more like three different bets about what kind of power you're dealing with, and what it will take to shift it. Dutiful dissent is the institutional mode. It works within existing systems — writing proposals, participating in official hearings, joining mainstream non-governmental organizations, signing petitions, and promoting green consumer choices. The organizations the authors list include three hundred fifty dot org, Friends of the Earth, Global Power Shift, and Climate Youth. The theory of power here is that the system is fundamentally responsive: that by engaging established procedures and political elites, young people can win direct access to those holding power and build legitimate authority for their claims. This mode has real strengths. It builds civic skills, creates institutional knowledge, and can produce visible policy changes at municipal or national levels. But O'Brien, Selboe, and Hayward are clear about the limits. Dutiful dissent adheres to the script of current institutions. That means it risks turning climate change into a technocratic pollution problem to be regulated rather than a structural challenge to be transformed. It tends toward consent and cohesion rather than contestation. And it rarely confronts the deeper economic paradigms driving emissions. It's a powerful tool in the toolkit, but — the authors are emphatic — it is not sufficient on its own. Disruptive dissent starts from a different premise. If entrenched interests will not reform through engagement alone, then external pressure is required. This is the mode of marches, blockades, sit-ins, divestment campaigns, and the deliberate interruption of business as usual. Disruptive dissent explicitly contests prevailing norms and the actors who maintain them. The authors cite Della Porta and Diani to note that it becomes prominent "when traditional norms no longer succeed in providing a satisfactory structure for behaviour." The paper's examples are concrete and deliberately chosen. The Students Divest network. The Break Free from Fossil Fuels campaign, which includes actions like blockading bank branches — one cited action targeted a New Zealand bank with 13.5 billion dollars invested in fossil fuels. Break Free actions have brought coal terminals to a standstill for hours and used dramatic symbolic interventions to make visible what is normally kept abstract: the direct financial link between institutions and climate harm. Disruptive dissent is a strategic bet, not an emotional outburst. The activists O'Brien and colleagues describe are making reasoned decisions about escalation, risk, and leverage. The strengths are real: visibility, momentum, and the capacity to introduce new concepts into public debate. But so are the risks. Disruptive dissent can be co-opted. It can polarize. When it threatens powerful economic interests, it attracts repression — the authors note that antiprotest and counterterrorism laws have been invoked against disruptive climate activists. And movements that fail to articulate what they are for, rather than just what they oppose, can find themselves isolated. That's where the third type enters — and it's the most conceptually striking. O'Brien, Selboe, and Hayward call it dangerous dissent. Not because it's violent, but because it challenges the foundational assumptions of the current economic and political order. Where dutiful dissent tries to fix the system from inside and disruptive dissent applies pressure from outside, dangerous dissent tries to build something different alongside it entirely. The examples range widely. Direct farmer-to-consumer market relationships that bypass supermarket chains. Plant-based diets adopted for both animal welfare and climate reasons. Transition towns. Sharing and gifting economies. Art practices that refuse commercial co-optation to circulate new climate imaginaries. And at the center of it all, the degrowth movement — launched to challenge the assumption that continuous economic growth is either desirable or sustainable, proposing instead voluntary downscaling of production and consumption in favor of care, solidarity, and cooperation. What makes dangerous dissent distinctive, the authors argue drawing on El Khoury, is its propositional character. It doesn't just oppose the dominant system. It transmutes resistance into "substantive acts of creation" — building processes and structures that embody the alternatives being fought for. New solidarities. New ways of organizing economic life. New cultural norms that make existing arrangements seem less inevitable. The authors are careful not to romanticize this. Dangerous dissent can be tolerated precisely because it poses no immediate institutional threat. It can remain the preserve of middle-class elites. Apparently progressive ideas — the sharing economy being the obvious example — can be co-opted by venture capital and for-profit platforms. These are real limitations, not hypothetical ones. But here's the key argument O'Brien, Selboe, and Hayward make about all three types together: they are not mutually exclusive, and the most effective social movements have always used all three simultaneously. The degrowth movement is their illustration. It contains dangerous dissent — proposing new norms and systems. Disruptive dissent — actively contesting growth hegemony. And dutiful dissent — working within democratic institutions to promote participatory alternatives. Those internal tensions, the authors argue, are not weaknesses. When recognized and valued, they are sources of dynamism and continuous evolution. The paper closes with a challenge rather than a prescription. Education matters — critical thinking can help young people reflect on power, develop dissenting strategies, and build civic capacity. But education alone is not enough. What O'Brien and colleagues are asking for is deliberate, reflective combinations of all three modes, shaped by honest engagement with the question of what kind of power you are actually up against. Because the answer to that question changes everything — which rooms you enter, which rules you break, and which alternatives you start building before anyone gives you permission. This lecture was created by ennepō. 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