Climate-smart agriculture adoption in rural Ghana: do resource requirements matter?

To create resilient food systems and agriculture against climate change and variability, farmers are urged to implement climate-smart agriculture (CSA). Despite its promotion by governments and development agencies, the resource requirements of CSA practices continue to keep smallholder farmers in Ghana from adopting them at a high rate. This study developed a typology for categorising CSA practices under their dominant resource requirements in Ghana's Sudan Savannah agroecological zone. We use data collected from 350 smallholder farmers in seven communities of the North East and Upper East Regions of Ghana to achieve the main aim of the study. We categorised 12 CSA practices under three main resource requirements, i.e., labour, land and finance to develop our CSA typologies. We further employed the multivariate probit and the multivariate ordered probit models to examine the factors that influence the adoption decision of smallholder farmers within each CSA typology. Our results show the three typological categories of CSA practices as: (1) land-intensive practices, (2) labour-intensive practices, and (3) finance-intensive practices. We find that institutional factors such as access to extension services, land tenure security, access to input markets and climatic shocks influence the likelihood and extent of adoption of the various resource-based typologies of CSA practices with gender disparities. Our estimation showed that while gender played no role in the adoption of both land- and labour-intensive practices, it was a major determinant in the adoption of finance-intensive practices with female farmers being less likely to adopt finance-intensive CSA practices. We again find that behavioural factors, particularly subjective norms which measures the effect of social pressure on adoption behaviour reduced the likelihood of adopting finance-intensive practices among males. Finally, the district fixed effects in our estimation shows that farmers in the more urbanised districts had a higher likelihood of adoption than those in the more rural districts. While different CSA practices have different resource requirements, farmers are willing to adopt multiple practices to maximize their synergistic effect. Policymakers must ensure access to farm inputs and extension services, and develop secure land tenure regimes that encourage investment in CSA practices by smallholder farmers.