INTERFACES Colloquium Series - #27

Incentive systems for sustainable land management in northern Ghana

Land degradation is a major concern in northern Ghana, driven by the complex interactions between human activities and the region’s fragile ecology. Sustainable land management (SLM) has emerged as an integrated strategy to address this challenge. This presentation explores land degradation in northern Ghana through a systems thinking perspective, focusing on how governance actors identify leverage points and deploy policy instruments to drive behavioural change and foster sustainable transformation of agricultural systems. Targeting mechanisms, especially when support packages must be distributed to smallholders to enable or incentivize the adoption of SLM practices, are also discussed. The findings provide a basis for stakeholders to evaluate the extent to which key challenges in agricultural subsystems have been identified, suitable solutions formulated, and policy instruments effectively applied to facilitate SLM scaling.