Collaborative climate labs: A youth-led methodology for co-creating community responses to climate change

This article presents the Collaborative Climate Laboratories (CiCli-Labs), a participatory research methodology that bridges citizenship, science and politics. This methodology is grounded on young people’s knowledge and experience about their communities and seeks to develop a strategy for co-designing climate solutions with local stakeholders. Carried out in schools, the CiCli-Labs engage scientists, activists, business owners, and politicians in discussing climate problems identified by young people. By bringing together different positionalities that emerge from people’s diverse social roles, the CiCli-Labs aim to foster conditions for democratic citizenship and climate justice, embracing the necessarily conflicting yet binding dimensions of politics that can produce transformative and reciprocal learning. Additionally, it responds to the growing demand within educational research for community-based approaches capable of tackling the shortcomings in promoting youth agentic power in participatory designs, often marked by one-off events and youth-washing practices. The CiCli-Labs’ methodology builds on community profiling, through which students identify climate-related issues that work as catalysts for broader dialogues with local actors, challenging traditional adult-centric power dynamics. The methodology evolves through a sequential design based on the adaptation of participatory tools and methods: i) Climate Problem Tree; ii) Climate Social Cartography; iii) Pros-and-Cons Circuit; iv) Solutions Funnel; v) Climate Speed Dating; vi) Hands on Earth and Eyes on Clouds. The methodology was implemented in eight schools in northern Portugal, involving more than 300 students (grades 8 to 12). We discuss the rationale and practicality of the CiCli-Labs while mobilising empirical illustrations of the methodological process and participants’ perceptions about it, thereby contributing to furthering the problematisation of democratic research practices with young people.