Together with our member Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) of the University of Bern, the SWISSCO Coordination Office collaborated on a seminar titled: Towards sustainable cocoa: assessing governance strategies and their theories of change. The master-level seminar started in the autumn semester 2022 and analysed and discussed how and under what conditions governance strategies are suited to contribute to sustainability of the cocoa value chains of Switzerland.
The most important governance strategies in the cocoa sector include:
– regulatory measures in Switzerland, the EU and in cocoa-producing countries;
– voluntary sustainability standards (e.g. certification schemes);
– cooperatives and collective action among producers;
– inclusive value chains;
– and landscape approaches.
Development of Theories of Change
Each student focused on selected strategies and sustainability targets (e.g. living income, deforestation-free value chains) in a particular cocoa producing landscape. Each participant analysed to what extent the selected strategies can contribute to sustainability targets. Students reviewed scientific literature, conducted expert interviews and developed a theory of change. Theories of Change (ToC) are a methodology in development cooperation and sustainability science to design and evaluate interventions. They articulate the interrelations between sustainability goals, diagnoses, knowledge gaps, context conditions, activities, pathways to impact, and methodological assumptions. The students' theories of change can be viewed in the gallery at the bottom of this page.
For a landscape in Madagascar, Sandra F. concluded that the following levers must be addressed to achieve a positive change in the system: improvement of land governance, participatory development of coordinated land management strategies, promotion of farm level innovations, and strengthening of the collaboration with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the private sector. Seminar paper
For a specific region in Côte d'Ivoire, Samuel W. identified that agroforestry, particularly with the adoption of a Community Resource Management Area (CREMA) approach, could be a possible contribution to address large-scale deforestation and poor economic performance of current small-scale cocoa production. Also, he found that obtaining higher yields and incomes alone cannot change farmers’ livelihoods. Seminar paper
With an emphasis on cocoa landscapes in Ghana, Lia H. finds that strengthening cooperatives and enhancing inclusive value chain and business models are key levers to achieve a living income for farmers. Further, she concluded that inclusive business models are still proposed as a niche innovation. However, if farmers or farmers’ cooperatives would have equity ownership, they could earn a larger share of the profits from chocolate sales. This is backed by studies that show that income substantially increased, and risks could be distributed along the value chain through such an approach. Nevertheless, multiple activities need to be taken simultaneously to ensure an impact on the income of farmers. Seminar paper
Based on her analysis of the cocoa sector in Colombia, Nora H. concludes that “a landscape approach is the best way to create all the necessary conditions for successfully scaling up cocoa agroforestry systems”, because it “pools resources and involves all relevant actors, leading to greater alignment and coordination of actors' activities in a particular direction”. Seminar paper
Focussing on Ecuador as the biggest cocoa producer in Latin America, Oliver C. identifies a mix of interventions around native varieties, agroforestry, post-harvesting processes and market interventions as promising outlook for more sustainable livelihoods of producers. Seminar paper
Exploring Peru’s cocoa landscapes, Aline V. identifies that traceability and inclusion of both female and male farmers in landscape approaches are important levers for deforestation-free supply chains. Seminar paper
Recommendations of the seminar for landscape programmes
The final section of the seminar was a two-day block seminar on 9-10 February. The first day was primarily dedicated to sharing and discussing the students' research findings from their seminar papers. The second day featured a panel discussion with CDE researchers who spoke about their experiences with pricing mechanisms, policy levers, cocoa as part of food systems and multi-stakeholder platforms.
Based on the scientific reviews in the students’ seminar papers and the expert knowledge from the panel discussion, the seminar participants synthesised the main findings on pathways to impact, pre-conditions and risks into concrete recommendations for landscape programmes targeted at living income and deforestation-free cocoa value chains:
Managing landscape approaches for sustainable cocoa:
– Collaborative cultures: Landscape projects often innovate relations between persons and organisations who have not collaborated before. Therefore, allowing for sufficient time and nurturing a collaborative culture is a critical pre-condition to allow trust, mutual understanding and shared interests to emerge.
– Managing inclusion: Landscapes are geographical spaces full of shared and competing claims to land uses. Therefore, landscape projects must adopt strategies towards inclusion and learning by taking into account and valuing local knowledge alongside scientific knowledge and offering safe spaces to marginalised groups.
– Agile project management for smart mixes: Landscape approaches are promising umbrellas to combine multiple interventions in a smart way at landscape scale, but their coherence cannot be taken for granted. Therefore, agile management practices are needed to enable emergence of coherence over time.
Pathways towards a living income:
– Achieving multiple sustainability targets at once: The targets of living income and deforestation-free cocoa can contradict each other, for instance if agricultural expansion fosters income at the expense of forests. Thus, it is crucial to adopt only sustainable land-use practices that reconciliate rather than compromise both targets.
– Women empowerment: Where gender equality does not exist, women empowerment is not only an end in itself, but a crucial pathway to achieving living incomes.
– Rethinking value propositions: Living incomes of cocoa producers will hardly be possible without inclusive supply chains that allow greater value creation and capturing by producers. Business development and collective action among producers, e.g. in cooperatives, small- and medium-enterprises or inclusive business schemes, can be suitable vehicles.
Pathways towards deforestation-free cocoa:
– Adopt conflict-sensitive approaches to project management: Many deforestation frontiers are often highly conflictual contexts. Therefore, conflict-sensitive management approaches can be valuable tools to maximise inclusion and participation, and prevent escalation of conflicts.
– (Co-)Develop a Landscape Management Plan: It is necessary to identify priorities in terms of land-use systems, areas, and activities together with relevant stakeholders. High-conservation value areas and appropriate agroforestry systems, for example, help maintaining a functioning ecosystem that meets local needs and prevents locally driven deforestation.
– Adopt a communication strategy: Local stakeholders often do not receive or understand relevant information about value chain and biodiversity conservation regulations, such as standards or protected areas regulations. It is important to provide information in an accessible way for these local stakeholders, to offer a likelihood for adhesion.
For SWISSCO, it was a pleasure to see how the students have developed over the last semester and how they have become emerging experts on the challenges and opportunities for action in the cocoa sector. We thank Prof. Dr. Christoph Oberlack and Dr. Ravaka Andriamihaja for inviting us and the speakers Dr. Irene Musselli, Samuel Brülisauer, Patricia Schmid and Jimena Solar for their inputs during the panel discussion.