The study, led by Moritz Egger, Michael Curran, and Johanna Jacobi together with colleagues in Ecuador and Switzerland, set out to address a persistent weakness in sustainability science. Most assessment frameworks used in agriculture are designed by experts and imposed from the outside, with criteria chosen by analysts rather than by the people whose lives the assessments are meant to improve. When smallholder farmers are asked to evaluate development pathways, they are often handed a menu of indicators they did not create, in a language and logic that may not reflect their own priorities. The research team wanted to know what happens when that logic is inverted, when farmers first generate their own criteria for what a sustainable future looks like and then deliberate together over which futures best satisfy those criteria.

The method unfolded in two stages. First, the researchers used a participatory technique called Photovoice, in which farmers photograph aspects of their own environment and livelihoods and use the images to articulate what matters to them. From this process, each farmer group generated its own set of sustainability criteria, grounded in local experience rather than external checklists. These criteria then became the foundation for a series of two-day workshops involving eight farmer groups and thirty-six participants across two contrasting regions: the Ecuadorian Amazon and the coastal lowlands. In the workshops, farmers evaluated four distinct scenarios for the future of their farming systems using three complementary techniques: intuitive ranking, in which participants simply ordered the scenarios by preference; urgency ratings, which captured how pressing participants considered the issues embedded in each scenario; and swing-weighting, a structured method from decision analysis that asks participants to assign relative importance to criteria by imagining the difference each would make when moved from its worst to its best state.

What makes the study methodologically distinctive is the set of indices the researchers developed to measure deliberation itself. Rather than simply recording final rankings, they calculated measures of individual deliberative reasoning, capturing how coherently each participant connected criteria to scenario preferences, and measures of intersubjective consensus, capturing how tightly the group’s judgments converged. These indices were computed both before and after the deliberation phase, allowing the team to observe not just where groups ended up but how the process of talking together changed their reasoning. This before-and-after design transforms what is often a purely qualitative observation, that deliberation seems to help groups agree, into something that can be quantified, compared, and potentially transferred to other participatory planning contexts.

The two regions told strikingly different stories. In the Amazon, where the farmer groups began with intuitive preferences for the four scenarios that diverged noticeably from one another, deliberation produced a remarkable convergence. By the end of the workshops, every Amazonian group had arrived at the same ranking of scenarios, a consensus that had not existed when the sessions began. Just as significantly, the weights that farmers assigned to their sustainability criteria shifted during deliberation, moving toward long-term environmental and social concerns and away from shorter-term or more narrowly economic considerations. In other words, the act of discussing trade-offs with peers did not merely smooth over disagreements; it appears to have changed what participants valued, prompting them to give greater weight to the slower, less visible benefits of environmental stewardship and social cohesion.

On the coast, the dynamics were almost the inverse. The coastal groups entered the workshops already sharing a strong preference for an environmentally restorative scenario, one that emphasized rebuilding ecological health in their farming landscapes. Here, deliberation did not change the overall ranking of scenarios at all. Instead, it reinforced the existing consensus, substantially increasing the degree of agreement on how the sustainability criteria themselves should be prioritized. The coastal experience suggests that deliberation is not only a tool for resolving conflict but also a mechanism for consolidating and sharpening shared values that a community already holds, making implicit agreement explicit and robust enough to support collective action.

Across both regions, the researchers observed a subtler and more intellectually intriguing pattern. In some groups, the alignment between intuitive rankings of scenarios and the rankings derived from the formal criteria-based weighting grew closer after deliberation, suggesting that participants had learned to reason in ways that connected their gut preferences to their articulated values. In other groups, the two modes of judgment actually diverged further, which the authors interpret as a sign that deliberation can surface trade-offs that participants had not previously recognized. When a farmer realizes that the scenario she instinctively favors performs poorly on a criterion she deeply cares about, the resulting tension is not a failure of the method but a genuine insight, one that a purely intuitive or purely technical evaluation would have concealed.

The modest but consistent increases in the importance-consensus and individual reasoning indices across the workshops indicate that these were not dramatic conversions but incremental refinements, the kind of slow alignment that real-world collective decision-making typically requires. This matters for anyone designing sustainability interventions, because it suggests that a single workshop cannot manufacture consensus where the underlying conditions for it are absent, but it can reliably tighten the connection between what people value and what they choose, and it can do so in a way that is visible and measurable. The deliberation indices proposed in the study provide a transferable framework for tracking learning, reasoning, and consensus in participatory planning, something that has long been called for in the literature on deliberative democracy and environmental governance but rarely operationalized with this level of specificity.

The broader implications reach well beyond Ecuadorian cocoa. Smallholder agriculture is where many of the world’s sustainability transitions will be won or lost, and the study demonstrates that the raw material for those transitions, locally grounded criteria, shared narratives, and the willingness to weigh trade-offs openly, already exists within farming communities. What is often missing is a process that can articulate and consolidate these shared visions without hijacking them with externally defined metrics. Deliberative multicriteria evaluation, when anchored in community-generated criteria from the very start, appears to fill that gap. For policymakers, NGOs, and researchers seeking context-sensitive interventions, the message is that the deliberation itself is not a soft preliminary to the real analysis; it is the analysis, and it can be measured, compared, and improved.

There is also a caution embedded in the findings. Because deliberation can both stabilize and reconfigure preferences, practitioners cannot assume that a consensus reached through discussion is simply the sum of pre-existing individual views, nor that it will remain static once trade-offs become clearer over time. The Ecuadorian cocoa farmers showed that communities are capable of sophisticated, self-directed reasoning about their own futures, but the process demands time, skilled facilitation, and genuine openness to the possibility that the outcome may surprise everyone, including the participants. In a world where sustainability planning is too often a box-ticking exercise performed on communities rather than with them, this study offers a concrete, quantifiable demonstration that giving people the tools to deliberate on their own terms changes not only the answers they reach but the values they bring to reaching them.

Subject of Research: Deliberative multicriteria evaluation of sustainability pathways in Ecuadorian cocoa farming communities

Article Title: Consolidation of shared sustainability visions through deliberative multicriteria evaluation in Ecuadorian cocoa farming communities

Article References: Egger, M., Curran, M., Aubert, A., Kearney, N., Ventura, D., Zambrano Mohauad, G. A., Santos Ordóñez, A. P., & Jacobi, J. (2026). Consolidation of shared sustainability visions through deliberative multicriteria evaluation in Ecuadorian cocoa farming communities. PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, 5(9), e0000279. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000279

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pstr.0000279

Keywords: cocoa farming, Ecuador, deliberation, multicriteria evaluation, sustainability transitions, smallholder agriculture, Photovoice, consensus, participatory planning, swing-weighting, Amazon, environmental governance

The scale of Ghana’s cocoa economy makes the findings significant far beyond the farm gate. Around 71 percent of the world’s cocoa is grown in West Africa, with Ghana the second largest producer after Côte d’Ivoire. An estimated 800,000 Ghanaian farmers cultivate cocoa on plots typically smaller than five hectares, and the crop contributes roughly 22 percent of the country’s agricultural GDP, employs about 45 percent of the population, and accounts for nearly half of all export earnings. Yet productivity per hectare has barely improved over the past decade. Historic gains in national output have come mostly from clearing more land, not from growing more beans per hectare, a pattern repeated across the region.

The technical picture behind stagnant yields is well understood. Continuous cropping has depleted soil organic matter, and yields between individual farms vary enormously, from roughly 100 to more than 1,000 kilograms per hectare, with agronomic management a major determinant of the gap. Surveys of soils in Ghana’s cocoa districts reveal low organic matter and low pH, consistent with a boom-bust cycle in which cultivation mines the soil of nutrients. Chemical fertilisers, the default remedy, bring problems of their own: they acidify soils, reducing the availability and uptake of nutrients, they can pollute surface waters, and their price puts the quantities farmers actually need beyond their reach. Most of the surveyed farmers relied on subsidised fertiliser from the Ghana Cocoa Board, but complained that supplies were inadequate and arrived late.

Organic amendments offer a technically elegant alternative. Compost supplies plant nutrients, rebuilds soil organic matter, improves structure, boosts microbial activity, and can even suppress nematode pests in cocoa farms. Biochar, produced by burning organic material in the absence of oxygen through pyrolysis, is a highly recalcitrant form of carbon that improves soil structure, increases water-holding capacity, and alleviates the soil acidity that chemical fertilisers worsen. Crucially, both can be made from cocoa pod husks, the fibrous shells left behind after the beans are extracted, which pile up on farms as waste. The husks are rich in phosphorus and potassium, and studies in Nigeria have shown that pod-husk fertiliser can lower costs and raise revenues on cocoa farms. Composting the husks has also been shown to suppress the Phytophthora pathogen responsible for black pod disease.

To find out why farmers were not exploiting this resource, researchers from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana, and the University of Reading surveyed 150 farmers randomly drawn from a population of 245 across five cocoa districts representing four soil types and all five major agroecological cocoa regions of Ghana. The districts, Aiyinase, Assin Foso, Dadiesoaba, Kade, and Nyarkrom, were selected using a soil map to ensure that Ferralsols, Lixisols, Nitosols, and Acrisols were all represented, since amendments may perform differently on different soils. A follow-up focus group of eight experienced farmers and cooperative leaders helped interpret the survey answers. The team is careful to note that participants were all already working with Cocoa Extension Agents, so the results describe engaged farmers rather than the most isolated growers.

The demographic profile that emerged is one of experienced but ageing farmers under real economic pressure. Respondents averaged 51 years old, with 16 years of cocoa experience on average, and three quarters had additional income sources, mostly petty trading, because cocoa alone could not sustain their households. One farmer told the focus group bluntly that the money from cocoa was inadequate for his family to survive a year. About 67 percent of farmers reported that soil fertility had declined over the years, and 92 percent said they could identify poor soil by signs such as unhealthy leaves, wilted pods, small beans, and falling yields. Yet when asked about organic amendments, only 6 percent had ever used any, and those cases turned out to be poultry manure, not compost or biochar.

The awareness gap was stark and, in places, almost comic. Nearly half the farmers had heard of compost, but overwhelmingly as a technique for growing vegetables, not cocoa, a legacy of alternative-livelihood training programmes run by COCOBOD and NGOs. Only 12.7 percent of those aware of compost knew how to make it. Biochar fared far worse: 97.4 percent had never heard of it, and none had any knowledge of how to prepare it. What makes the result remarkable is what happened when the concept was explained. Ninety-six percent of farmers unfamiliar with compost said they were willing to learn to make it, and 76 percent were willing to buy it, quoting an average price of 26.33 Ghana Cedis for a 25-kilogram bag. For biochar, 96 percent were willing to learn and 77 percent willing to buy. As one farmer put it, there is no market in Ghana where organic fertiliser can be purchased at all, even though national demand is estimated at 0.7 million tonnes per year and could rise to 2.7 million tonnes.

The study also uncovered a dangerous misconception. Farmers feared that spreading cocoa pod husks on their fields would spread disease, a worry echoed by official guidance from the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana that discouraged using the husks as compost. The scientific literature says the opposite: composting the husks suppresses Phytophthora and reduces black pod incidence. Farmers ranked the bulkiness of organic fertiliser, the labour needed to apply it, and transport costs as their biggest obstacles, constraints that fall hardest on older farmers and on women and migrants with less secure access to family labour. The researchers also caution that biochar is not a universal fix, since it works best on acidic, infertile soils and can depress growth on neutral soils, meaning soil testing should precede any application.

The path forward, the authors argue, already exists in Ghana’s institutional landscape. Nearly 95 percent of surveyed farmers belonged to cooperatives, 93 percent received regular visits from extension agents, and a COCOBOD pruning initiative achieved adoption rates near 99 percent when machines were supplied through cooperatives. Embedding compost and biochar training in the same channels, alongside certification schemes such as Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade and licensed buying companies, could replicate that success. With more than three quarters of farmers ready to buy amendments that nobody currently sells, the researchers see a clear opening for entrepreneurs to produce and distribute compost and biochar as a service, potentially supported by COCOBOD subsidies and the government’s One District One Factory policy. The raw material is free, the demand is proven, and the only thing missing, it turns out, is the message.

Subject of Research: Awareness and adoption of compost and biochar soil amendments among Ghanaian cocoa farmers

Article Title: Limited awareness prevents the use of compost and biochar as soil amendments by Ghanaian cocoa farmers

Article References: Awunyo-Vitor, D., Daymond, A., Quaye, A., Awudzi, G. K., Atuah, L., Mwafulirwa, L., Hammond, J., Turnbull, C., Lahive, F., Coole, S., Robinson, S., Hadley, P., & Sizmur, T. (2026). Limited awareness prevents the use of compost and biochar as soil amendments by Ghanaian cocoa farmers. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 273. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00754-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00754-6

Keywords: cocoa farming, Ghana, compost, biochar, soil amendments, soil fertility, cocoa pod husks, smallholder farmers, agricultural extension, pyrolysis, sustainable agriculture, COCOBOD