Whilst the notion of children's movement has been examined across diverse settings in the minority world, explorations within majority world contexts have remained more sporadic. This paper contributes to an emerging body of literature offering new perspectives on mobility which crossover with, and in some instances challenge, those understandings drawn from the minority world. The manipulation of mobility, central to the existence of the apartheid state in South Africa, has left an indelible mark upon the landscape of this emerging democratic society. However, through an investigation of children's independent outdoor mobility within a suburban area of Cape Town, this paper argues that the legacies of apartheid should not be considered as the seminal factor shaping geographical movements throughout neighbourhood space. Rather, it should be positioned alongside a range of different concerns, such as the mobility of baboon troops, domestic ‘guard’ dogs, traffic and family composition. Thus, for these children growing up in a post‐apartheid context, the influence of apartheid upon their outdoor mobility was both nuanced and inconsistent.

The growing climate crisis has shown how children and young people can be a political force to be reckoned with. While Greta Thunberg and many other young climate activists from around the world personify this force, there is another – largely hidden – story to be told about the everyday practices that young people adopt, in our homes, in our schools and in local communities to respond to environmental concerns. This issue brings together leading commentators to advance the future direction of research into young people’s everyday climate crisis activism. In this editorial introduction, we outline some of the new terrains for research, analysis and action that these articles collectively open up. The journal Children’s Geographies invites scholars to consider it as a place for the publication of articles that respond to the agenda-setting outlined in this collection and further advance work on young people’s everyday climate crisis activism.

This paper argues that in Patagonia-Aysén (southern Chile) nature discourses and neoliberalism have a close association. The current discourse of “green” development is presented as a capitalist practice, a renewed form of colonization that creates a narrative around the need to protect this pristine environment because it is a “Reserve of Life.” To explore these complex processes further, the paper presents fieldwork undertaken from 2017 to 2019 in the municipalities of Tortel and O’Higgins. Through extensive fieldwork that encompassed interviews and analysis of the Land Registry (Conservadores de Bienes Raíces, or CBR) of the region, we investigated the evolution of private property rights in both municipalities over a period of 29 years (1989–2017) in order to illustrate the changes in land ownership that had occurred. The paper puts forward the concept of eco-extractivism, in order to identify green-grabbing processes undertaken by extractivist investors in Patagonia-Aysén.

This paper calls for more sensitive understandings of children's experiences of autonomy and restriction in outdoor space. The study with children and adults living in a suburban area of Cape Town, South Africa, suggests that the imposition of adult structure and surveillance on childhood should not be automatically perceived as negative. The children's experiences were more nuanced and must be contextualised with reference to the predominant concern with (in)security in these suburban geographies. The notion of accompanied mobility is then considered to suggest how children's outdoor mobility might be framed as a collective or community responsibility, as opposed to an individualistic concern of parents.