Exploring Children’s Agency: Implications for Environmental Action in North India

Poor understanding of children’s agency, which underpins their actions, is problematic when the looming environmental crisis endorses children-led environmental action. The qualitative study with 35 children (nine individual participants and 10 sibling groups) from North India aimed to contextualize their agentic capacities. Thematic analysis of the interviews identified themes around relationality (e.g., the value of parental acknowledgement), the importance of skills, and constraints on agency associated with safety concerns and sociocultural biases. These findings about the quotidian expression of agency when mapped to Bandura’s model of agency help to identify areas for agency-enhancing interventions that could support children-led environmental action.