| Ghana is the world's second largest producer of cocoa beans and cocoa agroforests dominate the country's humid forest landscape. For more than a century, the cocoa industry has supported smallholder livelihoods and helped to fuel the national economy. In recent years, cocoa agroforestry systems have received considerable attention for their contributions to biodiversity conservation. However, little research has focused on the social factors and processes that not only created, but are responsible for maintaining these agroforestry systems. Therefore, this research sought to identify and understand the main factors from biophysical, cultural, social, and economic realms that are driving farmers' decision processes and practices in the establishment and management of young cocoa farms. Data was gathered using qualitative and quantitative methods from 89 cocoa farmers and their six year old cocoa farms, which were sampled from four villages in the Amansie Central and Adansi South districts of the Ashanti Region.;Contrary to common beliefs about the dominance of economic rationality, this dissertation reveals that every farming practice was influenced by a combination of interrelated economic, ethnographic and environmental variables; no single factor influenced farming decisions in isolation. The predominant factors driving farmers' decision processes include overcoming labor, capital, and socioinstitutional constraints; finding the culturally and ecologically appropriate balance between sunlight and shade; diversifying with secondary products; and conforming to the localized farming norms. In addition, knowledge rarely translated directly into practice as adaptation was very common due to these factors.;Overall, what this dissertation tries to articulate is that farmers' decision processes are driven by multiple factors, which reflect a desire to reap gains, but in reality demonstrate an effort to nurture productivity, in multiple forms, out of a complex and sometimes unpredictable bio-social farming environment that presents farmers with numerous constraints. In establishing cocoa farms, farmers rely upon the stability that comes from conformity, but as decision making becomes more complex farmers become more adaptive, which results in wide patterns of variation in shade management practices. Therefore, the cocoa agroforestry system in the southern Ashanti Region represents a stable resource system that is oriented towards socially bound gainfulness, but must retain enough flexibility to enable adaptation. |
