Climate Migration and Urban Resilience in Ghana: Linking Informal Settlements to Adaptive Governance

limate-induced rural-urban migration is intensifying across West Africa, placing unprecedented pressure on receiving cities. Ghana offers a particularly instructive case, ecological stressors in the northern savanna regions are dismantling rural livelihoods and channelling migrants into Accra's expanding informal settlements, where compound climate vulnerabilities deepen existing social inequalities. Existing studies treat climate-induced migration and urban resilience as largely separate bodies of inquiry. No integrated conceptual architecture accounts for the full causal chain from ecological stress in source regions, through the dynamics of informal urbanisation, to the governance conditions that either amplify or attenuate urban vulnerability. This paper develops the CMIVGR framework, derives four theoretically grounded propositions, embeds both within a systems feedback analysis, and grounds the argument comparatively across five West African cities. A qualitative conceptual synthesis draws on an integrative review of 85+ peer-reviewed sources, international policy frameworks, and grey literature spanning climate migration, urban informality, resilience theory, and adaptive governance. The paper produces four original figures and five analytical contributions: (i) the CMIVGR Conceptual Framework (Figure 3); (ii) the Systems Dynamics Feedback Loop / vulnerability spiral (Figure 4); (iii) the Adaptive Governance Framework (Figure 5); (iv) a Multi-Level Governance Model (Figure 6); and (v) a comparative cross-city analysis across five WASCAL-region cities paired with a six-pillar governance roadmap for climate-resilient African cities. Durable urban resilience requires a fundamental shift from engineering-dominated, reactive governance toward participatory, polycentric adaptive governance that treats informal residents as co-producers of resilience and migration as a legitimate adaptive strategy.