The Power of Care in Youth-Based Commoning for Climate Justice

This article examines the role of care in commoning practices within a youth-led climate justice movement through an intersectional lens. While scholarship on commoning identifies care as central to sustaining economies, communities, and the environment, less attention has been paid to how diverse modalities of care—shaped by race, gender, immigration status, and colonial power relations—structure participation, belonging, and political subjectivities within climate justice movements. Drawing on interviews with youth climate organizers, the article uses Tronto’s ethic of care to examine how practices of caring about, caring for, caregiving, care-receiving, and caring with cultivate shared purpose, mutual reciprocity, and solidarity. The findings show that care functions as a relational infrastructure for commoning by building and sustaining emotional bonds. However, care is also messy, partial, and implicated in the reproduction of unequal power relations. Racialized and immigrant members often carried disproportionate emotional labor while simultaneously navigating structural risks that white members did not always recognize, revealing limited engagement with the links between climate justice, coloniality, and privilege. Thus, care practices can coexist with exclusion, neglect, and uneven participation, even within a movement committed to justice. Attending to who performs the most labor-intensive forms of care opens possibilities for redistributing care work more equitably and fostering more reflexive and inclusive forms of commoning. Rather than framing climate justice solely as a technocratic or policy project, the article argues for understanding it as a relational and political process rooted in everyday practices of care, reflexivity, and solidarity.