Counter-Hegemonic Struggles for Seed Sovereignty in Ghana: “The government only listens when you take action and block the roads”

The governance of agricultural resources, particularly seeds, has long been a site of contestation between corporate-aligned institutions promoting proprietary seed laws and smallholder farmers, civil society organisations, and food sovereignty advocates defending traditional seed systems and local control. In Ghana, the introduction and eventual passage of the Plant Variety Protection Act of 2020, aligned with the 1991 International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, sparked intense resistance from a broad-based civil society coalition known as the Food Sovereignty Platform. In this paper, I frame the FSP’s mobilisation as a counter-hegemonic struggle against corporate-led agricultural policymaking. I adopt a realist approach to counter-hegemony and complement it with theoretical concepts from social movement coalition literature to examine the conditions that enabled the coalition’s formation, the multi-scalar strategies it employed, and the outcomes it achieved. Drawing on in-depth interviews and analysis of advocacy materials and parliamentary records, the findings show that shared perceptions of political threat, ideological alignment, and pre-existing social ties facilitated rapid coalition-building and sustained mobilisation. The FSP’s resistance strategy included direct-action and grassroots mobilisation, parliamentary engagement, legal contestation, transnational alliances, and the promotion of food sovereignty as an alternative model. Although the coalition did not prevent the law’s passage, it secured important concessions, increased public awareness, and exposed the influence of transnational agribusiness in Ghana’s policy space. The study demonstrates that legal contestation alone is inadequate for resisting entrenched power structures, underscoring the importance of coalition-building and multi-pronged resistance strategies when navigating and contesting uneven power relations in global agricultural policymaking.