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Background Citizen participation has been proposed to address the ‘wicked’ problem of child obesity, emphasising the need for novel solutions, grounded in the experiences of those most affected. Increasingly, children and young people (CYP) are participating in co-designing solutions to address child obesity – particularly actions aimed at creating health-promoting food environments (FE). However, little is known about how CYP are participating in co-design projects within England. This study aimed to explore CYP’s participation in co-designing actions to address child obesity in London that aimed to create health-promoting FEs.Methods A focused ethnographic methodology was used to study three emerging co-design research projects involving children and young people that took place across London in 2020. This approach used two qualitative methods: participant observation and semi-structured interviews. Twenty-six observations (of three co-design processes) and three semi-structured interviews (with facilitators of the co-design research projects) were conducted between January 2020 and March 2022. Data was imported into NVivo 12, and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.Results Data were centred around four themes: participation in what? who participates? participation for what purpose? how is participation occurring? Across the co-design research projects, the ages of CYP varied from 9–13, 16–18, and 14–19 years respectively. Two projects were conducted by market research organisations, and one by an academic research organisation. Two projects largely sought CYP’s views on adults’ preconceived ideas on addressing child obesity. Despite encouragement to co-design health-promoting FE actions, CYP largely suggested actions that targeted individual behaviour change in all three projects. When CYP were invited to create systems maps and conduct peer research to develop actions, CYP appeared to generate actions to ‘problems’ that they perceived as more urgent, including food poverty.Conclusion This ethnographic study provides rare insight into how citizen participation to address child obesity is occurring in real-world co-design research projects in London. Despite encouragement to focus on the FE, CYP suggested actions that targeted individual behaviour change and thus tended to reproduce an ideology of personal responsibility for health. This is important to consider when designing future co-design research projects that involve CYP to address ‘wicked’ problems, which could include using a range of activities and techniques that seek to address and confront these ideologies. Whilst interpretations are limited due to the small scale, and single geographical area, the findings will be combined with a scoping review of global research involving CYP in co-designing actions addressing child obesity.