Role-Playing for Better Climate Discussions: Exploring Climate Change Engagement Among Austrian Youth

Background

Engaging young people in climate policy discussions is essential for fostering long-term support for systemic climate action. However, traditional educational approaches often focus on conveying information, while falling short on inspiring citizen participation or encouraging transformative thinking. To address this gap, our study investigates the potential of a role-playing intervention for facilitating policy discussions and influencing climate change engagement among secondary school students in Austria.

Method

We conducted a role-playing intervention with 191 Austrian secondary school students, who assumed the roles of policymakers tasked with developing strategies to promote green jobs, a policy area increasingly relevant to their generation as well as for the green transition more broadly. The intervention was designed to simulate a simplified policy-making process. Over three rounds, students were presented with policy dilemmas. For each, they interacted with different fictional characters, developed and discussed ideas in groups, presented proposals, voted individually, and received feedback on the voting results.

To evaluate the intervention’s impact, we measured students’ psychological engagement with climate change with pre- and post-questionnaires. This included their willingness to engage in activism, belief in collective efficacy, and general climate change beliefs. We also assessed how students experienced the group discussions during the intervention.

Results

The intervention did not lead to significant changes in students’ willingness to engage in climate activism, their belief in collective solutions, or their general climate change beliefs. However, we found that students who reported positive experiences during the group discussions were more likely to affirm the reality of climate change post-intervention. In addition, students who entered the intervention with a higher willingness to act and a stronger belief in human responsibility for climate change were more likely to experience the discussions as positive.

Exploratory analyses revealed variation across school classes. Notably, classes with a higher proportion of female students were more likely to show increased climate engagement post-intervention. In contrast, rural vs. urban school location did not appear to systematically influence outcomes.

Conclusion

Although the intervention did not uniformly increase all dimensions of climate engagement, the findings underline the importance of discussion quality and group experience. The role-playing format encouraged students to explore complex policy issues in a collaborative setting, with positive experiences linked to stronger belief in climate reality. These results suggest that participatory approaches that encourage inclusive and engaging discussions can support climate policy engagement. Beyond the classroom, such methods may have value in broader public engagement efforts aimed at building support for climate action.