Introduction

Under what is known as the girling of development (Hayhurst, 2011), girls have received unprecedented attention as global activists and empowered figures uniquely capable of addressing our world’s most urgent crises. Early iterations of these programmes in the 1990s and early 2000s, such as Nike’s Girl Effect and the World Bank’s Adolescent Girl Initiative, focused on girls’ unique capacity to end global poverty. Increasingly, however, girls are being called upon to save our planet from climate change. Girl Rising (GR), a US-based ‘girl’s education non-profit’, has launched the Future Rising (FR) programme, described as ‘a virtual fellowship for young activists working on environmental justice storytelling with a focus on women and girls’ (Girl Rising, nd.c). FR fellows are to create a ‘body of knowledge about how the drivers and impacts of climate change intersect with girls’ education and gender equity’ (Girl Rising, nd.b). Although many of the inaugural fellows’ projects address the intersectional and global inequities of climate change, the FR programme itself – especially its promotional material and crafted lesson plans available to interested Global North teachers – remains committed to GR’s broader liberal emphasis on individual educational investment to not only improve the life trajectories of Global South girls but also to address a broad array of grave social crises. As GR boldly claims, the ‘future of our planet depends on investing in quality education for girls’ (Girl Rising, nd.b).

FR is an example of girl power environmentalism: an individualistic, colonial, and capitalist version of (Southern) girls’ personal responsibility for global planetary problems. Here, girls – because they are girls – possess a unique girl power waiting to be tapped into by Global North educational intervention and green employment initiatives. Under this thinking, girl power is all we need to address the climate crisis. Using what I refer to as decolonial feminism – a theoretical framework that encompasses Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-imperial feminist theorizing (Lugones, 2010; de Finney, 2014; Datta, 2015) – this chapter illuminates how FR constructs a limited, colonial, and capitalist version of girlhood informed by girl power environmentalism, one that works to conceal the variegated ways in which girls always already exist as political subjects in the world.