ABSTRACT
This chapter sets the stage for a socio-legal insight to children’s pathways of public participation in climate change matters. Notions on public participation of children centre around the discourse related to citizenship of children. Therefore, this chapter presents main theories on childhood and citizenship in contemporary discourse that not only understand citizenship as a status beyond the relationship between the individual and the state but also as different forms of dynamic processes or activities through which this status is experienced. Building on a synthesis of the ‘deliberative systems approach’ and ‘decentred deliberation’ models, this chapter creates and applies the notion of global climate citizenship of children to their public participatory actions, methods and spaces (altogether: pathways) which aim to achieve effective climate action at the global scale. This concept takes into account specific features such as children’s concerns for the climate, the cross-border nature of climate change and the globally connected citizenship practices, and the social constructions of spaces and forms of public participation in climate change matters.
