0000-0002-4714-6715As the climate crisis unfolds alongside democratic backsliding and rising authoritarianism, young people are already navigating changing climate realities and taking action in spaces where adults and institutions have struggled to respond. Yet many education systems continue to position youth as future leaders rather than present civic and political actors whose experiences, perspectives, and actions already shape planetary futures. Critical, participatory, and action-oriented approaches interrupt this logic by creating space for young people to question dominant assumptions, bring different ways of knowing into conversation, produce and communicate knowledge, shape public narratives, co-create responses with communities, and act on issues affecting their lives and futures. Youth agency emerges through these relationships and is exercised collectively with other people, communities, places, and the living world. Through meaningful participation and shared decision-making, young people build solidarity, exercise political voice, and contribute to change as it happens. The task for education systems is to recognize and connect with the agency young people already exercise across communities, movements, civic life, and relationships with the living world, while supporting their participation and sharing power with them.
Across contexts, young people are exercising agency in many forms—shaping public agendas, mobilizing collective action, protecting land, water, and living systems, and creating alternative ways of living and relating (Ritchie, 2021; Evans et al., 2025). From global movements such as #FridaysForFuture to Indigenous youth-led movements and local civic initiatives, young people are influencing public discourse and climate governance while also prefiguring different planetary futures (UNICEF, 2021; Karsgaard et al., 2026). Their action unfolds across multiple scales and spaces. Opportunities to participate in global summits and other formal decision-making spaces can enable young people to exercise political voice, influence decisions, and build relationships across contexts (Bindal, n.d; Buhre & Josefsson, 2025). At the same time, everyday forms of youth-led action—including community organizing, local environmental initiatives, advocacy, and other place-based practices—can cultivate sustained engagement and collective capacity (Skovdal & Benwell, 2021; Trott, 2024; Karsgaard et al., 2026). This agency is not limited to adolescents: younger children also exercise environmental agency through action in their schools and communities (Merritt et al., 2024). Recognizing this wider landscape of youth agency is especially important because many young people are systematically excluded from formal civic and political institutions. Their agency may take forms that conventional understandings of civic participation fail to recognize (Ritchie, 2021; Sambai Usek & Dunlop, 2025). Under authoritarian conditions, youth activism may become less visible as young people navigate repression and political scrutiny (Erfani, 2025). Together, these practices show young people already contributing to the political, social, cultural, and ecological transformations shaping planetary futures.
For education systems, the challenge is to recognize and sustain young people’s existing agency while removing the structures that exclude them or restrict their opportunities to act. Education systems can support young people to lead, make decisions, act collectively, and shape the institutions and communities around them by sharing power and providing the necessary time, resources, and institutional support. Yet schools often operate on assumptions about students’ readiness to participate meaningfully, reinforced by curricula and pedagogies that privilege knowledge acquisition over collective problem-solving, experiential learning, and action (Merritt et al., 2021; Merritt et al., 2024; Trott, 2024). These conditions can leave youth participation and collective agency peripheral rather than integral to education (Merritt et al., 2024; Iyengar et al., 2023).
These constraints operate at multiple levels. Epistemically, dominant curricula often prioritize abstract knowledge over lived, relational, and place-based learning. Critical and decolonial approaches can support young people to question these hierarchies, examine the assumptions underlying dominant responses to planetary crises, and engage with diverse ways of knowing and relating to the world. Structurally, rigid curricula, siloed subjects, limited resources, standardized accountability regimes, and individualized and competitive models of learning can restrict participatory, action-oriented education (Bartlett, 2023). Culturally, norms that frame students as needing protection from the emotional weight of climate crises or the complexity of real-world problems, while underestimating their capacity to act, can limit meaningful participation and shared decision-making. Educational cultures that reinforce human separation from the more-than-human world can further constrain the relational forms of agency, care, and responsibility needed to respond to planetary change.
Supporting youth agency is also a matter of rights. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (2023) affirms children’s right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment, including their right to be heard in environmental decisions that affect them. Realizing these rights requires education systems and other adult-led institutions to retain responsibility for addressing structural crises while sharing decision-making power, recognizing young people’s political agency, and creating conditions for meaningful intergenerational collaboration (Kappelman & Reynoso, 2026). Equitable and sustained intergenerational partnerships can strengthen civic identity, support the exercise of agency, and sustain engagement over time (Rousell et al., 2025; Stollberg et al., 2024), while land-based and relational pedagogies can situate agency within relationships of responsibility and reciprocity with place and other forms of life (Karsgaard, Pillay, & Shultz, 2024). When young people are recognized as contributors with decision-making power rather than included symbolically, they can influence institutional decisions, mobilize peers, strengthen community action, and expand opportunities for participation, particularly in rural and historically marginalized communities.
To support and expand collective agency, schools can make civic and climate action part of everyday learning. Participatory classrooms enable young people to exercise agency through real-world action, reflection, collaboration, and shared decision-making. Participatory approaches—such as Action-Oriented Pedagogies (Weinberg et al., 2024; Weinberg & Jordan, 2023), Green Schools Participatory Budgeting (Bartlett & Schugurensky, 2024), and critical and reflective pedagogies informed by Freire (2000) and Palmer (1998)—position students as active participants in imagining and enacting change, even in polarizing contexts. Action-Oriented Pedagogies, in particular, bring together preferred futures, collective orientations, systems thinking, and meaningful action through “real work with real consequences” (Weinberg et al., 2024). Green School Participatory Budgeting extends participation into institutional governance by involving students in decisions about how resources are used (Bartlett & Schugurensky, 2024). Across these approaches, students deliberate collectively, take action, and reflect on its consequences, bringing cognitive, affective, relational, and behavioral dimensions of learning into relationship.
What distinguishes these practices is their shared orientation toward learning as lived, relational, creative, and consequential. Transformation in these contexts can involve creating new possibilities as well as supporting communities to sustain and revitalize ancestral, Indigenous, and other knowledge traditions that dominant education systems have marginalized. Initiatives grounded in young people’ environments—including community-based inquiry, local environmental projects, participatory design, youth-produced art and media, climate decision-making through games, and explorations of food systems through cooking and cultural inquiry—enable learners to experience the effects of collective actions and understand themselves as participants in wider social and ecological relationships (Merritt et al., 2021; Attala, 2017). When young people create knowledge and cultural materials addressed to educators, policymakers, and wider publics, they can reshape conventional educational relationships: youth become educators and contributors to public understanding rather than merely recipients of adult knowledge. Learning becomes a practice of acting, creating, and communicating with others—human and more-than-human—through relationships of reciprocity, care, and shared responsibility. In these contexts, youth agency is exercised and strengthened through participatory, place-based, and creative practices that make education for planetary futures tangible, hopeful, and shared.
When young people participate as contributors and decision-makers rather than symbolic representatives, their knowledge, values, and creativity can reshape schools and communities. Through consequential action—co-creating responses, collaborating with communities, influencing decisions, and challenging structures that constrain their participation—they exercise and strengthen capacities for collective action and democratic engagement (Enverga, 2025; Iyengar et al., 2023). Critical pedagogies further support this exercise of agency by enabling young people to examine how power operates, question whose knowledge and interests shape existing systems, and imagine and enact alternatives (Freire, 2000). Sustaining such participation requires institutional structures that recognize diverse forms of youth agency and embed shared decision-making across curriculum, governance, and everyday educational life. Education can thereby become one setting through which young people’s existing agency contributes to social and systemic transformation.
The challenge is no longer whether young people are ready to participate. It is whether education systems are prepared to recognize and support their agency, share power, and create conditions for meaningful participation. Doing so requires aligning curriculum standards, teacher preparation, school improvement plans, and accountability frameworks so that youth participation and shared decision-making become integral to how learning is organized. Whole-school approaches and cross-school networks further expand reach and amplify impact (Hargis et al., 2021). When young people are recognized as present political and civic actors, supported in exercising collective agency, and included in decisions that shape their lives and futures, participation becomes part of how education itself is governed and transformed.
