Caught in the Rigidity Trap? Limits to Farmers’ Adaptation to Water Challenges in Ghana’s Smallholder Irrigation Schemes

This article examines how smallholder farmers adapt their behaviors in response to water challenges. It employs a mixed-methods design, including focus group sessions and a survey of, and interviews with, farmers and key stakeholders concerned with government and farmer-led smallholder irrigation schemes (SIS) in Ashaiman, Ghana. A water-dependent adaptive index (WDAI) is developed from the data to capture the dynamics of farmers’ adaptive behaviors. The analysis suggests that rigid institutional structures, prescribing (in)appropriate farming behaviors within the government SIS, constrain farmers’ capacity to adapt their behaviors. The absence of such rigidity provides flexibility for farmers within the farmer-led SIS to easily adapt by focusing more on their behaviors’ expected consequences. These schemes require government support (but not control) to create institutional spaces for experimentation and social learning, which are vital to farmers’ developing mental models that focus more on the Consequentiality of their farming behaviors, and less on its Appropriateness.