Greta Thunberg's climate activism: challenging generational and economic power

In this chapter we focus on the challenges to the social order made by Greta Thunberg as totemic leader of the Fridays for the Future Movement (FFF). Thunberg, and the FFF movement more generally, foreground the political and moral agency of children and young people in shaming world leaders for inaction over climate change. In her media-reported speeches Thunberg challenges two aspects of the social order. The first, the norms inherent in the dominant construction of childhood and adulthood that polarise generational relations on the basis of age. The second, neoliberal capitalism, where it subordinates people’s lives and social relations to the market and normalises inequalities in wealth. Like others of her generation, Thunberg seeks systemic social changes that confront the power relations embedded in patriarchy. Additionally, as a now-public figure who acknowledges she is on the autism spectrum, Thunberg effectively problematises the ableist discourse. Significantly, for child participation advocacy, the collaborative relations Thunberg and other young people in the FFF movement have with supportive adults illustrate the effectiveness of child participation strategies that resemble the model of child-adult bridge building, in contrast to ladders of empowerment models.