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Adaptation has become a priority in global climate change governance since the adoption of the Cancun Adaptation Framework and the Paris Agreement. Adaptation to climate change has been increasingly recognized as a multi-level governance challenge in both the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) regime and academic literature. This recognition often includes, explicitly or implicitly, the role that learning can play across governance levels to accelerate and scale up responses to address adaptation challenges. However, there is no comprehensive assessment in academic literature of how multi-level learning has been considered in the UNFCCC regime, what the enabling factors are, and the outcomes of such learning. Drawing on approaches suggested by multi-level governance and learning literature, this paper seeks to fill this knowledge gap by focusing on the ways in which the UNFCCC multilateral process enables multi-level learning for the governance of adaptation and how it could be enhanced. This will be accomplished through a legal–technical analysis of the enabling factors of multi-level learning in the governance of adaptation under the UNFCCC. Qualitative research methods have been applied for the thematic analysis of selected documentation, complemented by interviews and personal observations of adaptation negotiations in the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement. Results are presented according to three research questions oriented to understand how institutional design of adaptation under the UNFCCC enables multi-level learning; the learning strategies adopted across levels of governance; and the way the UNFCCC regime understands the contribution of multi-level learning for adaptation outcomes.

Climate change requires forward-looking policy responses. Developing such responses can be challenging for governments and, therefore, specific long-term institutions have been proposed for overcoming short-termism. However, the impacts of such institutions have been underexplored. In this paper, we analyze the influence of a long-term institution, the Dutch Delta Programme, on local governments’ decisions. The paper results are based on an analysis of climate adaptation strategies, investment plans and adaptation projects and interviews with policymakers, across seven Dutch municipalities. Results indicate that while local adaptation strategies are largely forward looking, adaptation projects tend to focus on solving present-day issues. We found that the Delta Programme enabled local governments to make forward-looking decisions and policies, by: (1) providing knowledge about climate vulnerabilities, (2) creating a broader framing of the issue of climate change, and (3) providing guidance for developing local climate adaptation policies.

Disasters call for rapid decision-making, with precious little time to select a course of action among several possible alternative options. Disaster risk decision-making is situated in the context of the shifting understandings of decision-making under uncertainty, intensified by climate change. Three research traditions are identified in decision-making: (a) classic analytical decision-making theories, (b) naturalistic decision-making (NDM) and sense-making, and (c) multiple streams and complexity approaches. Crisis decision-making and risk decision-making are increasingly becoming intertwined.

Despite the increasing need to address long-term challenges, public sector organizations are incentivized to focus on short-term results. This article uses an ethnographic approach to analyse how members of a regional water authority understand and deal with long-term policy problems as part of their everyday practices. It reveals three specific dilemmas: investing in the realization of objects or objectives, adopting a stable or responsive approach, and taking a proactive or reactive stance towards the external environment. The concept of strategic agility enables organizations to respond proactively to unexpected developments by devising strategies to steer as well as to accommodate change.

The federal government of Ethiopia set a national target to restore 15 million hectares of degraded and deforested lands by 2030. While forest and landscape restoration governance is intended to be a multi-actor process through which various land uses are coordinated, in practice it turns out to be difficult to bring specialised government agencies together to achieve restoration targets. We conducted a policy document review, 56 semi-structured interviews and 14 focus group discussions to understand the different challenges that exist in the governance of forest and landscape restoration in Ethiopia. We found three cross-sector challenges that influence the way in which national restoration targets are implemented at the local level in Ethiopia: 1) food security dominates the restoration policy frame and budgetary allocation at the expense of alternative restoration pathways that foster forestry livelihoods and biodiversity benefits, 2) agricultural and environmental policy objectives and targets, and restoration mandates at the sub-national level are incoherent, and 3) a siloed land use planning instrument makes it difficult to negotiate trade-offs and find synergies between sectoral policy objectives. Our results point out the need for an integrated land use planning instrument to achieve a wider range of restoration benefits. Given existing power imbalances between land-based sectors, we posit that an independent integrated land use planning authority that can draw on hierarchical authority is required to better balance different sector interests and different forms of conservation and restoration.

Interactions between society and water systems are influenced by decisions at different levels, from local farmers to high-level policymakers. In drought contexts, an additional layer of complexity concerns uncertainties with regard to expected rainfall and drought durations. In semiarid northeast Brazil, the idea of ‘fight against drought’ for a long has been the dominant idea among policymakers aiming to deal with drought impacts. This idea prioritizes water-supply measures such as the construction of reservoirs for water storage and hydraulic infrastructures to promote water transfers. A polycentric governance lens is used to understand the interactions and influences of multiple governance systems with competitive and cooperative relationships over water resources. We analyzed the multiple scale challenges in water management in the Banabuiú basin in the state of Ceará, using minutes from official water committee meetings, and qualitative data from interviews conducted with smallholder farmers, field technicians and civil servants in November 2021.Fieldwork interviews provided insights into conflicts of interest and prioritization of stakeholders involved in reservoirs' water management. Conflicts vary across scales and levels. On a river basin level, the over-reliance on water infrastructure contributed to a situation of conflict between irrigated farmers and urban users in the metropolitan region of Fortaleza. At the local level, conflicts exist between local communities depending on a reservoir and a state-level water-management organization, who decided to transfer water to a municipality located 25km away. Interviewees mentioned the government's decisions are “killing the river”. These cross-scale conflicts highlight the interdependencies between stakeholders and challenges in socio-hydrological systems.

In northeast Brazil, fight-against-drought and cope-with-drought have been identified as two different drought policy paradigms. This article aims to examine the persistence, coexistence, intertwining, and evolution of these drought policy paradigms by studying how they inform national policy responses in human-water systems. The questions guiding our research are what do the paradigms of fight-against-drought and cope-with-drought consist of and how did the competing paradigms develop over time? To address these, the research draws on a systematic analysis of policy documents, multiannual strategic plans from 2000 to 2020 (the most recently published), and interviews with key informants. This study found the paradigms evolved with the persistence of the fight-against-drought paradigm with incremental changes of the cope-with-drought. The coexistence of paradigms started in 2004 and was in 2016 that the persistence, coexistence and intertwining of both were established. We use two theories, Hall’s (1993) policy and Lindblom’s (1959, 1979) incrementalism for analyzing the influences drought policy paradigms in human-water systems. This study provides new insights to understand the role of ideas in policy processes empirically showing how drought policy paradigms gradually evolve influencing policy responses.

Participatory water valuation workshops are useful for their valuation outcomes, but can they also foster social learning? Social learning involves changes in understanding through social interactions between actors, which go beyond the individual to become situated within wider social units. Participatory water valuation workshops involve dialoguing about knowledge, perspectives, and preferences, which may be conducive to social learning. In this paper, we assess the social learning potential of a participatory valuation workshop, based on a case study in Tasmania, where farmers, water managers, and a policy maker shared their personal perspectives on the past, current and future values of irrigation water. To assess the social learning potential of a single participatory valuation workshop, we analyzed drivers - that is, factors positively influencing social learning - and outcomes - that is, indications that social learning occurred. Data were collected through an exit survey, in-workshop reflections and semistructured interviews following 3 weeks and 6 months after the actual workshop. The results indicate that the workshop provided the drivers for social learning to occur. In addition, participants indicated to have learned from and with others, and that the workshop provided improved and extended networks. According to the participants, the workshop led to a shared concern about increasing prices for water licences and induced substantive outcomes related to the use, management, and governance of irrigation water. We conclude that participatory valuation workshops, such as the one analyzed here, can foster social learning.

Water scarcity and drought are sustainability issues that cut across borders and different scales and levels of organizations and cannot be designated to one governmental authority. Due to hydrological droughts in semi-arid Northeast Brazil, the region deals with water scarcity. In the case of Ceará state, water is stored in multiple reservoirs as part of a water supply system and is managed from different levels of organization. These are considered governance scales that include state level-, regional level- and municipal level institutions, local level communities, and individual households. Water management in Ceará is an example of how polycentric governance brings a multifold of governmental and non-governmental actors together for the management of public goods in the society, and therefore cross-scale and cross-level interactions are inevitable. However, a variety of multiple challenges of contradictory water policies, diverse and varying levels of water users and multiple overlapping governance systems and organizations in combination with resource depletion make equitable water allocation challenging in Ceará. For this reason, this research aims to examine the scale mismatches in the water management processes and level misalignments of different governance levels and understand the influences of multiple governance systems on collectively managing water for equal water allocation. The following research question is used: What are the scale mismatches in water management and the misalignments of levels in water governance in Ceará state, and how have these affected the equitable access to water by different groups?A polycentric governance lens is used to understand the interplay and influences of multiple water governance systems with competitive and cooperative relationships over water resources. We analyzed the multiple scale challenges in water management in the Banabuiú basin in the state of Ceará, using minutes from official water committee meetings, and qualitative data from interviews conducted with smallholder farmers, field technicians, civil servants and researchers in November and December 2021.Literature research and fieldwork interviews in Ceará provided insights into user conflicts and mismatches across varying scales and levels. Our results show that, at river basin levels, e.g., networks of reservoirs and the river basin of Banabuiú, conflicts of prioritization between small-scale farmers and urban water users occur when the metropolitan area of Fortaleza is prioritized. Prioritization of the metropolitan region has been shown to result in limited and non-participatory decision-making, lack of information sharing and restrictions for irrigated farmers at the local scale. At the local scale, state interference in water management is in some cases not appropriate to the local context or in accordance with local knowledge. These scale mismatches occur due to multiple types of local water management, lack of responsibility for the management of monitored and unmonitored reservoirs, and various overlapping assisting agencies at the community level. The cross-scale interactions and conflicts in water management systems highlight the interdependencies between stakeholders and scale challenges in socio-hydrological systems.

This article aims to explain various disaster governance paradigms that have emerged and currently exists in Nepal. A disaster governance paradigm is a comprehensive set of prevailing and institutionalized ideas that shape disaster plans and policies that eventually are implemented on-the-ground. Nepal has prepared various disaster plans and policies at the national, provincial and local level, but there are major gaps in disaster risk preparedness, with annual floods and landslides continuing to be responsible for the loss of lives and heavy infrastructure damages. In this article, we show how disaster governance paradigms have evolved between 1982 and 2019, using policy document analysis and semi-structured interviews with key policy actors. The study found that four major disaster governance paradigms exist in Nepal – (1) response and recovery; (2) disaster risk reduction and management; (3) integrated climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction; and (4) federalized disaster risk reduction. The results of this study show that multiple state and non-state actors such as key government ministries, NGOs, INGOs and other civil society actors are competing over resources and there is an ongoing administrative struggle for promoting different disaster governance paradigms. There has been a push from various civil society actors to prioritize disaster risk reduction in Nepal. Finally, we conclude that it is too early to assert that the decentralization process will be able to reduce disaster risk for vulnerable communities, especially with the federalization of Nepal's disaster governance.

While increasingly more is known about how to reframe the relevance of climate change, much less is known about how people deal with situations in which they are confronted with frames that are incompatible with their own frames. The current research conducts an interactional framing analysis to investigate how users in climate change blog comments interactively construct the meaning of issues, identities and relationships, and their interactions. Results show that most framing differences start with issue framing but thereafter shift to identity and relationship or process framing. Finally, users mostly deploy polarizing interaction strategies to deal with these framing differences.

The efforts of Bolivia’s water sector to adapt to climate change include the mainstreaming of adaptation in water policy instruments and broad capacity building processes supported by climate funds and international cooperation. These sector-wide adaptation experiences in the country present important learning challenges across different governance levels. This paper analyzes multi-level learning in the governance of adaptation taking place in the water sector in Bolivia, by focusing on changes in the cognitive, normative and relational domains of learning. The analysis is guided by three questions: (i) Which institutional arrangements enable multi-level learning in the governance of adaptation in Bolivia’s water sector? (ii) What are the cognitive, normative and relational dimensions of learning in these arrangements? (iii) What are the implications of multi-level learning for shaping desired outcomes in the governance of adaptation? The case contributes to understanding multi-level learning processes in the governance of adaptation, including the role of national and international climate change policy instruments in these. In addition, the study provides methodological insights for assessing multi-level learning.

Farming in Ghana’s Volta delta is increasingly affected by variability in rainfall conditions and changes in land-use patterns. Under such socio-ecological conditions, little is known about farmers’ decision-making in response to uncertainties in uncertain rainfall conditions. To fill this gap and add to the literature on adaptive decision-making, we addressed the central question: what are the existing patterns of farming decision-making under uncertain rainfall conditions, and which decision-making strategies are adaptive? We developed an adaptive decision-making framework to investigate the behavior of farmers under variable rainfall conditions in Ghana’s Volta delta in the Ada East District. We conducted 5 interviews with agricultural extension agents, 44 in-depth interviews and 4 focus group discussion with farmers. Subsequently, we interviewed a sub-selection of 32 farmers. Findings of the study shows that farmers carry out different decision-making patterns in response to the variable rainfall conditions. We distinguished six strategies: three based on flexibility and three based on robustness. Flexible adaptive decision-making strategies are switching dates for sowing seeds through wait-and-see or delay strategy, muddling through the farming season with the application of various options and alternative irrigation strategies. Robust adaptive decision-making strategies are portfolio strategy of transplanting seedlings in batches, selection of robust (hardy) crops, and intercropping or diversification. Based on how farmers select strategies in response to uncertainty in rainfall conditions, we argue that some decision-making strategies are more adaptive than others. Findings of this study are relevant for the design and implementation of climate related agricultural projects.

This article shares findings from a participatory assessment study of a community-based environmental monitoring project in the Peruvian Andes. The objective of the project was to generate evidence to support sustainable livelihoods through participatory knowledge generation. With the use of narrative framing, the study retrospectively reconstructs the project's trajectory as perceived by the three stakeholder groups: the community, the researchers, and the implementing NGO. This analysis reveals discrepancies between the stakeholder groups both in their view of the course of events and their understanding of the purpose of the intervention. However, while the storylines depict differing project trajectories, they often agree in terms of long-term goals. The study also uncovers some neglected positive externalities that are of considerable significance to local stakeholders. These include community-to-community knowledge transfer, inter-generational knowledge sharing and ecosystem knowledge revival. The article illustrates how assumptions and expectations about participatory projects are encapsulated in narratives of positive change despite the limited level of agreement among stakeholders about what such a change should comprise. It sheds light on development narratives and their power to shape stakeholders’ perceptions in accordance with their beliefs and priorities. This is of special importance for ecosystem governance projects, which are sensitive to normative differences and subject to competing claims.

Water funds are task-specific organisations that conserve and restore watersheds. The funds provide sustained finance and a collaborative space for actors at different levels to improve the water regulation functions of upstream ecosystems, safeguard water quality, and establish ecological connectivity with the aim of ensuring downstream water quantity and quality. However, while implementing conservation and restoration efforts at local level, water funds encounter scale challenges, consisting of mismatches between the ecological and the governance scale and misalignment between governance levels. This study's aim is to identify and unravel both the scale challenges with which two Ecuadorian water funds (FONAG and FORAGUA) were confronted and the scale-sensitive governance strategies that they planned and deployed to overcome them. We collected data through a document review, 48 semi-structured interviews, and participatory observation, and used content analysis methods to analyse the interview transcripts. Consequently, at both funds, we identified a blind spot towards rural livelihood realities, a temporal mismatch between short-term election cycles and long-term restoration timelines, and a spatial mismatch between the reach of restoration efforts and degradation processes. At FORAGUA, we also identified heterogeneity across levels regarding the purpose of restoration, with different spatial implications. We identified a total of 12 tailored strategies that the two water funds deployed or aim to deploy in reaction to these challenges in an attempt to re-create fit with ecological processes and alignment with other governance levels. Some of these strategies caused new scale challenges to emerge. By observing and acting on emerging scale challenges, water funds try to stay on course to achieve restoration objectives. We conclude that the water funds, which are governance arrangements designed to create spatial and temporal fit with ecological processes, have to continuously adapt their governance strategies to maintain cross-scale fit and cross-level alignment.

Building on different bodies of the governance literature, we propose a conceptual framework specifying nine scale-sensitive governance arrangements that aim to (1) create cross-scale fit between the governance and ecological scales, and/or (2) foster cross-level alignment between different governance levels. To understand how scale-sensitive governance has played out in practice, our systematic review builds on 84 peer-reviewed empirical journal articles, which represent 84 cases of forest and landscape restoration governance. In the case studies, we identified eight out of nine scale-sensitive governance arrangements: moving tasks to other governance levels; task-specific organisations; polycentric governance; multilevel coordination; multilevel collaboration; multilevel learning; bridging organisations; and multilevel networks. These arrangements constitute important elements of the multilevel environmental governance landscape, and we analysed their role in promoting forest and landscape restoration. By using the proposed conceptual framework, a better understanding is created of how different scale-sensitive governance arrangements can support existing and future restoration efforts that are implemented as part of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

The concept of wicked problems has served as an inspiration for research in a variety of research fields but has also contributed to conceptual confusion through the various ways in which it has been defined and used. In this special issue, a number of ontological, theoretical and methodological issues are discussed. First, while its use as a buzzword has undermined precise conceptual definition, recent work goes beyond the wicked versus tame dichotomy and conceptualizes wickedness as a matter of degree, differentiates between dimensions of wickedness and emphasizes the relational character of problem definitions. Second, new and existing governance approaches have often been unproblematically proposed as ways to solve wicked problems, while only imperfect solutions, partial solutions or small wins are achievable in practice. Third, the concept of wicked problems has had little direct impact on policy theories, and while some argue that the analysis of wicked problems should be mainstreamed in public policy thinking, others propose to reject the concept and rely on existing policy theories. Fourth, as a concept used in policy practice, wicked problems tend to provoke either paralysis or an overestimation of what policy can do about wicked problems. Possible ways forward include (1) leaving the concept behind; (2) using the wicked problems literature as knowledge base to understand when and why policy and governance approaches fail; and (3) developing dimensions of wicked problems (i.e. conflict, complexity and uncertainty) into more analytically precise research tools and linking them with more closely with contemporary policy science developments.

Municipalities worldwide are confronted with the need to take long-term decisions about ageing water infrastructure in the face of unpredictable future developments. Previous studies on long-term decision making have proposed solutions targeted at the domain of either politics or planning. This study combines insights from the domains of policy, politics, and planning by using the Multiple Streams Framework to explain what enables municipalities to take forward-looking investment decisions. We combine the configurational MSF perspective with an explicitly configurational method namely fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis and apply this to 40 cases of Dutch municipalities. We conclude that enabling conditions differ for small versus medium-to-large municipalities. Furthermore, forward-looking investment decisions can be achieved regardless of the municipalities' organizational analytical capacity. In fact, and contrasting to the requirement of the MSF, not all streams necessarily have to be present for forward-looking decisions to occur. For medium-to-large municipalities, forward-looking investment decisions are stimulated by: (1) the presence of organizational analytical capacity, (2) transactional/networking political leadership in situations without focusing events, or (3) entrepreneurial/transformative political leadership in situations with focusing events. For small municipalities, forward-looking investment decisions are stimulated by networking/interpersonal political leadership combined with the occurrence of focusing events.

Scale framing makes an important difference to how complex environmental policy issues are defined and understood by different groups of actors. Increasing urban water demand and uncertain future climatic conditions in the Andes present major water governance challenges for the coastal regions of Peru. An understudied dimension of Peruvian water governance is how scale framing shapes the way problems are defined, and solutions are pursued. Here, we aim to strengthen the understanding of scale framing as it relates to highland-coastal interactions in central Peru between 2004 and 2015. By analysing this period of significant water governance reforms, we identify five prominent water-related frame dimensions and three differently scaled policy storylines and reveal how they developed and intersected over time. The storylines, supported by particular visualisations, either foreground ‘urbanshed’-level investment in water supply infrastructure, community-level cultural restoration for improved local agricultural production, or nationwide watershed-level financial mechanisms for highland ecosystem conservation. Our study shows how the intersection of these storylines at different moments during the policy process often had a strengthening effect, creating a coalition of actors who were then able to generate sufficient momentum and support within the Peruvian government for the implementation of conservation-based watershed investments.

Interactions between society and water are complex, socio-hydrological systems are influenced by policies, which rarely are a simple linear response with the aim of providing the most efficient solution. In drought contexts, a new layer of complexity is added, considering the different uncertainties involved, related to the rainfall season, or the duration of multi-year drought events. We utilized the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) theory to answer the following question: how do multi-year droughts function as focusing events? Focusing events may trigger greater attention to problems and solutions because they increase the likelihood that more organized interests, including some that are influential and powerful, could advocate policy change. MSA seeks to explain how policy changes. It assumes the policy change happens when three separate streams interact: (1) the problem stream, involving the emergence or recognition of a problem by society; (2) the policy stream, containing policy ideas and alternatives generated by specialists, researchers, politicians, and social actors; and (3) the politics stream, referring to the political, administrative, and legislative context favorable or unfavorable to developing certain actions to overcome the problem. The justification to apply the MSA lenses in this is study is to understand the influences of multi-year drought events as a focusing event that triggered the process of policy change considering the subnational context of Ceará state in Brazil. In this study, the following methodological procedures were used: (a) historical overview of drought occurrence and the policy responses in Ceará; (b) data processing of hydrologic records (rainfall). We found three main different policy approaches to drought impacts: reactive, proactive, and drought preparedness policies. We found in some cases that multi-year droughts served as focusing events that opened windows of opportunities, triggering policy response changes, such as, collaboration, new problem framing, and increased political attention. Our findings have implications for the socio-hydrology field, as there is still significant scope for increasing the understanding of the influences of public policies in the context of coupled-humans systems, especially in the context of drought.

We review the role of multistakeholder partnerships in responding to sustainability challenges. We refer to sustainability as achieving a balance between use and regeneration of resources, achieving quality of life now and in the future, while preserving ecological processes on which life depends (Gray & Stites, 2013). Partnerships are increasingly emerging as vehicles for confronting sustainability challenges across the globe that typically transcend sectors and governmental boundaries and implicate many different stakeholders whose actions impact each other. We draw on a systematic review of the management and public policy literatures (Gray & Stites, 2013) as well as additional research from specific problem domains to address four broad topics: 1) The challenges of sustainability and the affordances of partnerships as a response; 2) Types and purposes of sustainability partnerships; and 3) Obstacles to partnership success; and 4) Outcomes of sustainability partnerships. Overall, we argue that the more that partnerships seek to be transformational, the greater the challenges partners will confront as they try to shape a sustainable future. We conclude with future research questions that will enhance our knowledge of sustainability partnerships.

Polarization and group formation processes on social media networks have received ample academic attention, but few studies have looked into the discursive interactions on social media through which intergroup conflicts develop. In this comparative case study, we analyzed two social media conflicts between farmers and animal right advocates to understand how conflicts establish, escalate, and return dormant through issue and identity framing and the discursive use of emotions. The results show that the two groups used the same set of frames throughout the three phases. We identify this as a symmetric conflict framing repertoire. The groups both use a dominant moral frame (animal welfare is of absolute value), but express distinct views on policy solutions. This triggers a contestation of credibility (who knows best and who cares most for animals) in which the two groups use the same set of issue and identity frames to directly oppose each other. The binary opposition is initially established through issue framing but escalates into an identity conflict that involves group labeling and blaming. The discursive use of emotion reinforces this escalation in two ways. First, it reinforces a vicious cycle in the contestation of credibility: While emotions are implicitly used to frame oneself as caring and trustworthy, emotion is explicitly used to frame the other party as deceptive and irrational. Second, disputants use collective emotions as a response to the other group’s offensive actions (blaming) and as a justification of one’s own collective actions. We discuss how this conflict differs from previously studied conflicts to provide plausible explanations for these findings.

With digital agriculture as a path to transforming the agricultural sector in the Global South, there has been a rise in digital service provision. To counteract potentially negative ethical, social justice, and environmental impacts of digital agriculture, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has been offered as a possible solution. There are, however, scant accounts of RRI in the context of digital agriculture in the Global South. To this end we consider Esoko, a leading social enterprise in Ghana which provides information services to smallholder farmers. The question arises of how the innovation process adopted by Esoko can allow for designing actionable and scalable digital solutions for targeted food systems amidst a variety of uncertainties whilst addressing issues of inclusion and responsibility. The study presents an analysis of whether and how RRI occurs under such conditions of uncertainty by studying how Esoko designs digital services that enable actionable knowledge creation in food systems. The study explores how three objects of uncertainty (strategic, institutional and substantive) impact Esoko’s capability to engage with RRI (characterised by inclusiveness, anticipation, responsiveness, and reflexivity). Our findings point to evidence of how substantive, strategic, and institutional uncertainties impact the inclusive, reflexive, anticipatory, and responsive character of innovation processes undertaken by social enterprises such as Esoko.

Rice farmers in Northern Ghana are susceptible to climate variability and change with its effects in the form of drought, water scarcity, erratic rainfall and high temperatures. In response, farmers resort to weather and seasonal forecast to manage uncertainties in decision-making. However, there is limited empirical research on how forecast lead time and probabilities influence farmer decision-making. In this study, we posed the overall question: how do rice farmers respond to forecast information with different probabilities and lead times? We purposively engaged 36 rice farmers (12 rainfed, 12 irrigated and 12 practising both) in Visually Facilitated Scenario Mapping Workshops (VFSMW) to explore how probabilities and lead times inform their decision-making. Results of the VFSMW showed rainfed rice farmers are most sensitive to forecast probabilities because of their over-reliance on rainfall. Also, an increase in forecast probability does not necessarily mean farmers will act. The decision to act based on forecast probability is dependent on the stage of the farming cycle. Also, seasonal forecast information provided at a 1 month lead time significantly informed farmer decision-making compared to a lead time of 2 or 3 months. Also, weather forecast provided at a lead time of 1 week is more useful for decision-making than at a 3 day or 1 day lead time. We conclude that communicating forecast information with their probabilities and at an appropriate lead time has the potential to help farmers manage risks and improve decision-making. We propose that climate services in Northern Ghana should aim at communicating weather and seasonal climate forecast information at 1 week and 1 month lead times respectively. Farmers should also adapt their decisions to the timing and probabilities of the forecast provided.

Local knowledge about weather conditions is often crucial to farming practices in developing countries. It is potentially valuable when combined with scientific knowledge. Citizen science approaches rely on participatory environmental monitoring to source knowledge and information from citizens. The study examined the opportunities and challenges for tapping into local knowledge by using smartphone applications – this topic is often discussed but less studied empirically. Based on an in-depth qualitative case study approach, involving interviews and workshops, a citizen science experiment involving 22 farmers in Ada East District, Ghana was analyzed. Farmers were handed smartphones to digitally enter their weather forecasts, their local indicators, and actual rainfall. The study found that the daily display of the forecast on WhatsApp generated interaction and feedbacks among farmers and experts. The usability of the smartphones and digital applications for recording local information depends on an appropriate user interface, language, cultural context, the Internet, and electricity coverage. The study also presents lessons on motivation of farmers and the challenges of linking different knowledge systems. Critical areas identified for future consideration include data ownership and the expansion of the project to reach numerous farmers.

This study investigates the hybrid informational governance arrangements involved in the provision of ICT-enabled Weather Information Services (WIS) for farming in Ghana. Farmers and organizations providing WIS were interviewed. Findings show that multiple technologies are used by combinations of government, business, and civil society organizations to provide various WIS for farming. The ICT has facilitated the creation of different hybrid informational governance arrangements, categorized as multiplicity, intertwinement, and coalescence, which permits flows of WIS across scales, from international non-state organizations to farming communities, often by-passing national and district-level government organizations. Government organizations remain key players in the provision of WIS.

Many West African farmers struggle to cope with changing weather and climatic conditions that keep them from making optimal decisions and meeting food and income security. The development of more accessible and credible weather and climate services (WCIS) can help local farmers improve their adaptive capacity. Such adequate WCIS often requires a joined collaboration between farmers and scientists to co-create an integrated local and scientific forecasting knowledge. We examine (i) the design requirements (i.e. Both technical and non-technical tools) and (ii) evaluate the outcomes of a successful implementation of the co-production and delivery of WCIS in Ada East district, Ghana. We implemented a user-driven design approach in a citizen science experiment involving prototype design and testing, training workshops, and interviews with farmers, agricultural and meteorological extension agents from 2018 to 2019. Farmers were handed with digital tools (i.e. Smart phones with web and mobile applications) and rain gauges as research instruments to collect and receive weather forecast data, and interact with scientists. Our results show that farmers’ engagement increased over time and is associated with the trainings and the improvement of the design features of the applications used. The evaluation shows an increase in the usability of tools, the reach or networking with other farmers, and the understanding of uncertainty (probabilistic) aspect of the forecasts over time. Local farmers evaluated both the local and scientific forecasts as accurate enough and useful for their daily farming decisions. We concluded that using modern technology in a co-production process, with targeted training, can improve the access and use of weather forecasts information.