What resilience theory and praxis can learn from multi-dimensional approaches to understanding poverty: A study of Ghanaian cocoa forest landscapes

Resilience – broadly understood as withstanding, and adapting to, shocks and risks – has emerged as a central discursive device for converging humanitarian needs with climate change responses. This paper’s human-centred engagement with resilience draws on the case of smallholder farmers engaged in rain-fed cocoa production in Ghana’s Central Region, to systematically unpack how poverty shapes smallholders’ responses to drought, with differing effects on resilience. The surveys, focus groups, and interviews were gathered before, during, and in the aftermath of, a prolonged El Niño-induced drought, facilitating pre-drought and post-drought comparisons of poverty conditions and their interactions with resilience. We centre our analysis on smallholders’ definitions of both poverty and resilience. We consider how co-identified dimensions of poverty interact with three co-identified dimensions or “outcomes“ of resilience: i) meeting critical needs; ii) implementing adaptation; and iii) preparedness for future climate shocks. We find that higher cocoa incomes were not associated with meeting critical needs during a drought, while many other poverty indicators were important across different dimensions of resilience e.g., adequate healthcare access, access to clean drinking water, food security, livelihood diversification, and access to livestock. Thus we advocate that: resilience, like poverty be understood and addressed as multi-dimensional; that resilience be considered in tandem with people’s own livelihood concerns; and that interventions look beyond raising cash crop productivity. Although diversifying income is a common resilience-boosting policy, we found greater livelihood diversification was associated with lower preparedness scores and meeting fewer critical needs in the drought year. Income diversification’s ability to alleviate multiple dimensions of poverty is constrained by financial exclusion, lack of market linkages, and structural poverty barriers such as illiteracy, tenure insecurity, or non-potable water. Thus efforts to address households’ poverty and climate resilience must be holistic and responsive to local contexts.