Learning Environmental Citizenship from Below: Insights from Bulgarian Youth’s Everyday Climate Activism
In this blogpost, which is based on a recent article in Youth, Turkan Firinci Orman shares how young people in Bulgaria enact climate activism through everyday practices, quiet resistance, and relational care, revealing everyday and relational forms of environmental citizenship that challenge dominant ideas of youth engagement. This blogpost is part of NORRAG’s “Provocations for education from youth climate activism” blog series.
Youth climate activism is often portrayed through dramatic spectacles with global school strikes, viral speeches, and mass protests. Yet in many contexts, especially outside the affluent Global North, such forms are rare or inaccessible. Instead, activism often unfolds quietly through everyday choices, small refusals, ethical reflection, and care for places, bodies, and communities. This blog post draws on my ethnographic research with young people in Bulgaria, a post-communist society shaped by socioeconomic inequalities, institutional distrust, and limited support for public environmental mobilization. Rather than asking why Bulgarian youth do not protest en masse, the study examines how they already live, learn, and enact environmental citizenship daily. The findings reveal diffuse, relational, and mundane forms of agency that challenge dominant narratives and offer insights for education systems.
Bulgaria’s post-socialist transition, EU integration, economic inequalities, and corruption legacies shape the backdrop. Grassroots concerns such as illegal logging, biodiversity loss, and urban sprawl are prominent, yet youth political participation remains low due to distrust and perceptions of politics as an adult domain. Protests around environmental or anti-corruption issues exist but are often seen as risky or ineffective. Social media raises awareness, though public activism can still carry stigma.
Within this context, young Bulgarians occupy liminal political positionings, navigating thresholds between victimhood and agency, passivity and resistance. Drawing on Engin Isin’s performative citizenship theory and Turkan Firinci Orman’s framework on youth environmental agency, their actions are analyzed through four overlapping modes: Victim agency (limited awareness, powerlessness), voter agency (ethical consumption or formal participation), rejecter agency (localized protest or grassroots resistance), and interpreter agency (reflexive, everyday critique of environmental ideologies).
The study, part of a larger multisite ethnography, involved 13 participants aged 12–19 from diverse socioeconomic, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds. Using geo-social methods like online mapping via Padlet, semi-structured interviews, and reflective essays, it explored intersections of climate change with daily life, consumption habits, and emotional responses. Participants came from urban centers like Sofia, coastal cities, and rural villages, including Bulgarian, Turkish, Roma, Armenian, and mixed heritage youth. Two were in foster care, highlighting intersecting vulnerabilities.
Learning to Become Environmental Subjects
Young people learn eco-literacy, as the understanding of ecological systems and human impacts, across hybrid spaces that often contradict one another: formal education (e.g., geography or civic classes), social media (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube), family practices, urban/rural environments, and consumption arenas like supermarkets. These spaces blend online and offline, fostering liminal identities shaped by certainty and doubt, hope and resignation.
For instance, many participants encountered climate information via digital platforms, with videos on plastic pollution or Antarctic melting evoking eco-anxiety, as documented in IPCC reports. Yet, formal schooling often emphasized facts like recycling drills, sidelining emotional or justice-oriented dimensions. Intergenerational learning added layers: one participant discussed wildfires with her grandmother via radio news, while another clipped newspaper articles on global warming with his grandfather. Half the group engaged in school projects like tree planting or waste collection, bridging formal and informal realms.
Urban-rural mobility further shaped eco-literacy. Most had moved between settings or visited rural relatives, fostering ties to nature through gardening or sourcing local food. This hybridity highlighted class divides: urban youth with STEM access showed higher systemic understanding, linking consumption to climate, while rural counterparts drew on lived experiences of pollution but felt more powerless due to limited resources.
Four Modes of Performing Environmental Citizenship
The findings illustrate these modes through youthful profiles, revealing activism as diffuse and embedded rather than absent.
- Resigned Bystander (Victim Agency): Characterized by limited awareness and resignation, often due to economic precarity or institutional mistrust. Lidia (19), in foster care on the coast, focused on waste but felt overwhelmed by pollution and corruption. She made efforts to minimize consumption but saw climate action as ineffectual. Her perspective echoes broader eco-anxiety in vulnerable youth where structural barriers foster inaction.
- Eco-Conscious Participant (Voter Agency): Involves trust in institutions and ethical choices like boycotting. Anahit (18), from a wealthy southern family, led school sustainability projects and avoided fast fashion, researching brands for ethical labor. She advocated affordable eco-options, noting paper bags’ high cost deters sustainable choices. Her involvement in student councils and NGOs amplified agency, aligning with “buycotting” trends supporting green brands amid economic inequalities.
- Climate Advocate (Rejecter Agency): Entails resistance through localized protest. Daniel (15), from Sofia, joined efforts against the Struma motorway threatening Kresna Gorge‘s biodiversity. Influenced by friends, he participated in clean-ups and opted for local food to counter corporate exploitation. Despite setbacks, he held hope: “There’s still hope… Hope dies last!” His activism, rooted in family gardening and water-based sports experiences (on rivers, the sea, and in gorges), fostered sensitivity toward nature and politicized everyday practices such as carrying refillable bottles.
- Reflective Practitioner (Interpreter Agency): Combines reflexivity and creative reinterpretation for systemic change. Nikolai (18), from a Black Sea city, minimized consumption, boycotting chocolate over child labor and favoring second-hand items. He drew from scientific YouTube channels like MinuteEarth, linking Antarctic crab invasions to warming oceans. Skeptical of municipal recycling, he ideated alternatives like repurposing waste as fertilizer, embodying quiet and creative, interpreter-driven resistance.
These modes coexist with intersectional aspects, influenced for example by gender, ethnicity, (im)mobility, and geography. Participants often expressed emotional attachment to nature, while minority youth navigated compounded inequalities. Urban participants leaned toward voter/interpreter modes with higher eco-literacy, while rural ones leaned toward victim/rejecter, reflecting direct exposure to degradation but also limited infrastructure, fewer participatory channels, and reduced institutional support, constituting systemic barriers to environmental action.
Reframing Environmental Education from Below: Relational Eco-Literacies and Everyday Agency
What do these findings imply for education? In Bulgaria, environmental and civic education continues to prioritise formalised knowledge such as climate facts or recycling norms, often reproducing colonial and capitalist assumptions rooted in Global North frameworks. This top-down approach overlooks how young people engage with environmental issues in everyday life. The study shows that eco-literacy emerges relationally through lived experiences, emotions, family interactions, consumption practices, and digitally mediated learning beyond the classroom.
Recognising eco-literacy as relational requires valuing quiet and often invisible forms of engagement as political. Practices such as ethical consumption, family discussions, peer learning, and social media engagement function as meaningful sites of agency, even when they fall outside dominant models of activism. Acknowledging these practices broadens what counts as participation under constrained conditions.
The findings also underline the importance of embracing ambivalence and uncertainty in environmental learning. Young people navigate tensions between care and powerlessness and between personal responsibility and structural constraint, particularly in relation to corporate power and consumerism. Educational approaches that allow space for these tensions can foster critical awareness without individualised blame.
Finally, the study highlights the value of geo-social and place-based pedagogies that link learning to local contexts while recognising movement across rural and urban and online and offline spaces. Participatory tools such as mapping and co-created curricula can surface uneven experiences and amplify intersectional voices, supporting young people as interpreters and agents of more sustainable futures.
Why Everyday Activism Matters?
Bulgarian youth’s stories remind us that climate politics does not unfold only in streets or online spaces, but also in kitchens, classrooms, villages, and everyday consumption choices. Positioned in between uncertainty and action, young people enact environmental citizenship through ordinary practices that gradually build eco-literacy. This is not apathy, but a quiet provocation for education: to take local, everyday forms of resistance seriously and to rethink how equity and sustainability are taught.
The Author:
Dr. Turkan Firinci Orman is an interdisciplinary senior researcher based in Tampere, Finland. Her work focuses on youth environmental citizenship, everyday activism, eco-literacy, and lived political agency across diverse sociopolitical contexts.