From Awareness to Agency: Theorising Youth-Led Climate Action Through Design Thinking in Ghanaian Schools – A Conceptual and Framework Contribution

Abstract This conceptual and framework paper theorises the structural barriers limiting youth climate agency in Ghanaian secondary and tertiary schools and advances the Youth-Led Climate Action Lab (YCAL) as a five-phase, design-thinking-grounded intervention model, drawing on Ghanaian educational research, West African climate policy literature and four bodies of theory: social cognitive theory, transformative learning, postcolonial environmental education and Critical Emotional Awareness pedagogy. We argue that the persistent gap between students’ climate awareness and their capacity to act is not a knowledge deficit but a structural product of educational systems that deny young people mastery experiences, civic channels for voice and the emotional scaffolding needed to engage climate anxiety productively. We present a comprehensive implementation framework adaptable across diverse Ghanaian and African school contexts, engaging directly with the critiques most threatening to the framework’s coherence: the depoliticising tendencies of design thinking, the power asymmetry of cross-level student partnerships and the structural inadequacy of micro-actions against systemic climate failure. We are honest about which of these are resolved and which remain open empirical and political questions. A directed research agenda specifies the theoretical questions that empirical work must answer.