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Title Climate-smart cocoa governance risks entrenching old hegemonies in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana: a multiple environmentality analysis
ID_Doc 79172
Authors Maguire-Rajpaul, VA; Sandbrook, C; McDermott, C; Hirons, MA
Title Climate-smart cocoa governance risks entrenching old hegemonies in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana: a multiple environmentality analysis
Year 2022
Published
DOI 10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.09.015
Abstract Smallholders in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana supply over 60% of the cocoa to the $120bn global chocolate industry. Like colonialists and multilateral banks before them, foreign chocolate corporations today attempt to govern the behaviour of smallholders in Ivorian and Ghanaian forests via a recent proliferation of 'climate-smart' cocoa (CSC) schemes. In this article, we seek to understand what is new and different - if anything - about contemporary, climate-smart governance of cocoa and forests. To do this, we apply and temporally extend Fletcher's 'multiple environmentalities' framework to classify the various techniques by which smallholder behaviour has been steered throughout the history of cocoa and forest governance, comparing the cases of Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana by drawing on interviews with 200 smallholders and documentary analysis. This framework parses diverse 'techniques of government' used to shape subjects' behaviour, including: sovereign (imposing laws), disciplinary (internalising norms), neoliberal (constructing material incentives), and liberation (emancipatory self-rule). We show that across all eras and in both countries - despite divergent political economies - small-holder behaviour has been predominantly governed by overlapping neoliberal and sovereign governmentalities, whose legitimacy has increasingly relied on reframing smallholders as environmental subjects. We demonstrate how smallholder voices remain marginalised and argue that corporate-led CSC schemes build upon and reemploy past sovereign powers (e.g., threatening to evict smallholders from protected forests), thus entrenching long-standing power asymmetries and overlooking critical differences between countries. Notably, cross-border corporate governance schemes ignore, and thereby (unwittingly) inflame, Ivorian violence and ethnoreligious strife.
Author Keywords Environmentality; Cocoa; Forests; Neoliberal; Cote d'Ivoire; Ghana
Index Keywords Index Keywords
Document Type Other
Open Access Open Access
Source Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)
EID WOS:000820442300008
WoS Category Geography
Research Area Geography
PDF https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Climate-smart_cocoa_governance_risks_entrenching_old_hegemonies_in_C_te_d_Ivoire_and_Ghana_a_multiple_environmentality_analysis/25721598/1/files/46002201.pdf
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