Climate-Smart Cocoa in Ghana: How Ecological Modernisation Discourse Risks Side-Lining Cocoa Smallholders

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) aims to transform and reorient farming  systems to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, boost adaptive capacity,  and improve productivity while supporting incomes and, ostensibly, food  security. In Ghana—the world's second biggest cocoa producer—the cocoa  sector is challenged by increasing global cocoa demand, climate change  impacts, as well as mounting consumer pressure over cocoa's  deforestation. Climate-smart cocoa (CSC) has emerged to address these  challenges as well as to improve smallholder incomes. As with CSA more  widely, there are concerns that CSC discourses will override the  interests of cocoa smallholders, and lead to inequitable outcomes. To  better understand if and how the implementation of CSC in Ghana can meet  its lofty ambitions, we examine (1) the dominant CSC discourses as  perceived by stakeholders, and their reflection in policy and practice,  and (2) subsequent implications for cocoa smallholders through an equity  lens. Through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions  with key stakeholders in Ghana's cocoa sector, we find overwhelming  consensus for an ecological modernisation discourse with the promise of a  “triple win” narrative that simultaneously stops deforestation,  supports climate mitigation and adaptation, and increases smallholder  livelihoods. Moreover, we find that implementing CSC on the ground has  generally converged around “sustainable intensification” and  private-sector-led partnerships that aspire to generate a “win-win” for  environment and productivity objectives, but potentially at the expense  of delivering equitable outcomes that serve smallholders' interests. We  find that the success of CSC and the overly-simplistic sustainable  intensification narrative is constrained by the lack of clear tree  tenure rights, complexities around optimal shade trees levels, potential  rebound effects regarding deforestation, and the risks of  agrochemical-dependence. More positively, local governance mechanisms  such as Ghana's Community Resource Management Area Mechanisms (CREMAs)  may give cocoa smallholders a stronger voice to shape policy. However,  we caution that the discursive power of dominant private sector actors  may risk side-lining equity which could prove detrimental to the  long-term wellbeing of Ghana's ~800,000 cocoa smallholders.