Children, young people and sustainability: introduction to special issue

This special issue draws together diverse new research papers about children and young people’s lives, practices and knowledges relating to sustainability and environmental or ecological issues. The special issue emerged from two sessions on children, young people and “sustainability” at the Annual International Conference of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers, held in London in 2010. The sessions were organised by the members of the New Urbanisms, New Citizens project: a three-year programme of research exploring children and young people’s everyday lives and citizenship in new “sustainable communities” in England. Our decision to organise the conference sessions, and subsequently convene this special issue, was rooted in three observations. First, there is now a substantial, international body of evidence – from diverse educational (Hacking and Barrett 2007, Hicks and Holden 2007, Davis 2009), psychological (Koger and du Nann Winter 2010), sociological (Grønhøj 2007, Larsson et al. 2010) and geographical research (Morgan 2006) – demonstrating that childhood and youth are typically crucial periods in the socialisation and (re)production of individual habits, norms, dispositions, values, lifestyles, identities and feelings of care and belonging which can have all manner of complex, enduring environmental, ecological and political consequences. At the same time, beyond explicit work on childhood and youth, theoretical approaches to behaviour change have cohered around integrated theories of social practice that have sought to account for the socialisation and reproduction of norms around the environment (e.g. Shove et al. 2012). Drawing on similar concerns with habits, norms and dispositions, such theories have crucially, demonstrated the ineluctable interplay of internal (psychological) and external (social) factors in fostering environmentally relevant knowledges and behaviours (Kollmuss and Agyeman 2002). In this way, ‘practices’ are figured as constellations or networks of discourses, performances and materials: the interlinking of multiple actions within a given context (such as an institution) that produce longer-standing dispositions; the significance of material objects – cars, recycling bins, energy monitors – to the production of behavioural norms; the accordance of meaning – and emotion – to particular behaviours such that they become understood as imperatives (or not) (Poortinga et al. 2004; Shove et al. 2012). The sessions sought to explore how children and young people acquire knowledge and norms of sustainability issues, and how and where these knowledge are practiced (or not) within everyday spaces. Second, the sessions also emerged from a range of rich, recent social scientific and educational literature detailing some of the important ways in which children and young people are participants in everyday communities of practice which have complex, multiscalar environmental, ecological and political consequences (Hicks 1994, 2012, Jeffrey and Dyson 2008, Bordonaro and Payne 2012, Punch and Tisdall 2012). For example, the sessions sought to explore the extent and characteristics of children and young people’s participation in diverse domestic spaces, family practices, school communities, everyday routines, neighbourhoods and locally, nationally or globally politicised issues salient to sustainability.