| Summary: | <p>Climate change is interacting with other shocks to produce new vulnerabilities, reinforce existing hardships and food insecurity, and expose inequities. This thesis examines these dynamics using cocoa- and food crop-producing households in the Central Region of Ghana as an empirical case study. The research employs a mixed methods approach, including fieldwork insights primarily from semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and household surveys.</p>
<p>The first thesis paper contributes considerations of climate change to the literature on the cocoa lean season and the food security implications of farming cocoa compared to food crops. It evaluates the roles of cocoa and food crops in households’ access to food during the lean season and extreme and variable weather. The findings highlight the critical role of food crops in sustaining households’ seasonal food access in the context of climate change. The paper further argues that farmers need more climate adaptation support for their food crops, as government extension services instead prioritise the cocoa cash crop.</p>
<p>The second paper empirically examines how climatic events interacted with COVID-19 restrictions and disrupted cocoa payments over a two-year period. It proposes a novel methodological framework for more systematic assessment of vulnerability to multiple shocks and further examines the roles cocoa and food crops play in households’ vulnerability and coping strategies. This paper finds that the interacting shock effects amplified households’ income and food shortages, and exceeded households’ capacity to cope.</p>
<p>The third paper critically reflects on the equity implications of remote collaborative fieldwork, using a novel application of a social equity framework. Drawing on how this doctoral research was conducted in the context of climate and COVID-19 crises, the paper evaluates nuanced trade-offs for global North researchers, Southern researchers, and Southern participants during such alternative ways of working. It finds that remote ways of working may encourage the redistribution of benefits towards Southern researchers but that contextual inequities between researchers and participants may remain.</p>
<p>This thesis argues that research and policy overlook food crops’ essential role in smallholder farmers’ incomes and food access in the face of climate change and multiple shocks, as cocoa income cannot consistently sustain households. However, due to cocoa-centred government priorities, farmers do not receive adequate support for their food crop production or adaptation, resulting in difficulties coping and hardships that will worsen as the climate crisis deepens. This research also contends that systematically unpacking the effects of multiple shocks contributes to a deeper understanding of vulnerability, empirically demonstrating this with analysis of climate change and COVID-19. Finally, this work encourages researchers to consider different modes of fieldwork and to actively interrogate the equity implications for the different actors involved.</p>
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