Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This study shows how Ghanaian community environmental initiatives advance climate justice by using local governance practices. These actions reveal gaps in national policy and demonstrate how community leadership can shift power and support fair, sustainable climate futures.

Paper long abstract

Despite policy commitments aimed at adaptation and resilience in Ghana, climate governance remains dominated by technocratic, top-down interventions. These approaches however, fail to address the structural drivers of vulnerability namely, unequal resource distribution, weak local decision-making power and the marginalization of indigenous ecological knowledge. A persistent disconnect is observed between national climate policy frameworks and community-level governance practices that mediate environmental change. This gap limits Ghana’s ability to advance climate justice as a more transformative development agenda.

This study aims to examine how community-led ecological governance initiatives in Ghana operationalise climate justice and expose the limitations of existing climate governance architectures.

Using an embedded qualitative case study design, the study compares three forms of community environmental action in Ghana, namely women-led mangrove restoration in the Volta Basin, youth digital monitoring networks in Accra, and customary land stewardship in northern Ghana. These practices show how groups promote climate justice by redistributing authority, exposing policy gaps, and shaping sustainable futures. The study draws data from semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis to understand how community initiatives support climate justice.

Findings suggest that these community initiatives offer different ways of making and sharing environmental decisions. They promote fairness, equal access and shared responsibility across generations. These examples show that communities are not only vulnerable to climate change but also produce new ideas and practices that improve environmental governance. The paper argues that bringing these community-led approaches into national climate policy is important for building fair, locally grounded, and sustainable climate futures in Ghana.