Saving the Planet by Empowering the Young?

Abstract

We examine whether there is a good case for empowering the young—through youth quotas and further measures—in order to increase environmental protection. While we shed no doubt on the cause of empowering the young in general or on the cause of protecting the environment in general, we raise a number of worries about using the former as an instrument for the latter. First, from a democratic perspective, it is objectionable to increase the influence of a certain part of the electorate as a means for giving additional weight to certain views. Second, the reasons that make it important that certain segments of society represent their interests themselves hardly apply in the case of the young. Third, we should not overstate how much more the young are affected by environmental degradation than the old, in particular not when we take into account that other unrepresented groups—such as the unborn, non-citizens, and animals—are heavily affected by present environmental policy decisions as well. Fourth, it is surprisingly unclear whether the young display particularly strong pro-environmental attitudes and behavior.

Conclusion

In this paper we highlighted multiple problems with the initially appealing idea of introducing measures to empower the young on the grounds that this serves environmental goals. We should stress that we are neither opposed to measures which empower the young, nor to environmental protection—quite on the contrary. We only meant to question using the former as an instrument for the latter. Measures to increase the presence and the voice of the young in politics might well be justified on further bases besides environmental protection—for example, on the basis that this would better familiarize the young with the political process or on the basis of better approximating the all-affected-principle—and there are innumerable further effective and justified instruments for protecting the environment besides empowering the young.

Regarding the particular measure to empower the young prominently discussed in this volume, namely youth quotas, we argued that even in those cases where wanting to empower the young is justified, it is not clear that this requires descriptive representation, i.e. that the young have to be represented by the young. Certainly, if it turns out that young people are more likely to vote if there is a young representative on offer, then this might provide a reason for lowering the median age of political representatives. But there is nothing about being young per se that requires young political representatives.

Regarding empowering the young as a means for preventing environmental degradation more generally, we raised three additional worries. First, the idea of increasing the influence of people with certain views in order to push substantive goals stands in tension with democratic ideals. Second, the young are not much more affected by environmental problems than the old and they are affected less than other groups. Appealing to their objective self-interest could in principle even be counterproductive in case this appeal makes voting in one’s own personal interest look more respectable. Third, an empirical examination makes it questionable whether the young are particularly good defenders of the environment.¹⁰