Climate-smart cocoa governance risks entrenching old hegemonies in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana: a multiple environmentality analysis

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 – smallholder 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 re-employ 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.