Politicization of intergenerational justice: how youth actors translate sustainable futures

In recent years, sustainable futures have gained momentum in the political discourse on shaping policies to better cope with future challenges in Europe and around the globe. Society’s transformation towards sustainability—formerly the exclusive domain of sustainability scholars and a few politicians and activists—has begun to become a topic of interest more widely debated in mass media and among the general public. For example, a 2019 Forsa survey revealed that most Germans perceive climate change as the country’s most urgent problem. The notable spark in interest in 2019 correlated with the beginning of the Fridays for Future (FFF) movement and with the first instances of extreme weather events that had been directly linked to climate change in public debate, for instance, the droughts in Germany in 2018 and 2019 and the severe rainstorms in 2021. When sustainable futures left the niches of various expert circles and became a political (and a politicized) subject, they also became controversial in subsequent public debates. Many disputes arose around concerns over justice. While skeptics of sustainable futures often claimed that social justice would be endangered by ambitious climate mitigation measures, other actors in the field declared the opposite, namely, that being lax about climate protection policies would jeopardize social justice goals with respect to improved living conditions and fairness for the next and subsequent generations. Both sides of the issue found support in the public discourse, but spokespersons from the younger generation tended more strongly to support the view that ambitious climate protection measures would be more likely to increase social justice than that it would lead to less just, less fair distributional outcomes. Nevertheless, some representatives from this camp shared concerns about the distributional impacts of climate protection measures, even though they did not question the absolute necessity to prioritize climate. The position taken by these representatives manifested itself in their insistence that the potential burdens and costs of climate protection be equitably shared.

For more than any other reason, climate justice and intergenerational justice were popularized in order to expose and emphasize the different kinds of inequalities that precede climate change, which are in turn reinforced through its consequences. Until recently, intergenerational justice was something that was discussed intensively mainly among philosophers and political theorists. In recent years, however, young people, most prominently the Fridays for Future activists, have politicized the term “intergenerational justice,” which has resulted in an increasing popularity of justice issues in general in environmental debates. In this paper, we want to trace how young people understand intergenerational justice and how this new understanding contributes to a process of politicization of sustainable futures. We refer to politicization as a process of shifting subject matter away from being of more narrow, administrative, or technical interest towards becoming a topic of public contestation and open public scrutiny. Growing politicization of sustainable futures and the growing awareness of justice issues in sustainable futures mean that challenges as well as opportunities emerge for transformations towards sustainability. Potentially, the nexus of justice and sustainability can even drive transformation processes.