Floodplain farming and maladaptation to extreme rainfall events in northern Ghana

The floodplain of the Black Volta River traverses the Ghana-Burkina Faso international border and offers considerable potential for agriculture. Yet, it is a risk-filled landscape with acute vulnerability to flooding. This paper seeks to explain why agriculture in the floodplain remains so popular when it manifestly causes more problems. Data for the paper comes from empirical fieldwork using qualitative in-depth interviews (n = 68), which were analysed using a deductive coding approach. Overall, the findings suggest that mining-induced land displacement compels farmers to engage in floodplain agriculture despite heightened vulnerability to flooding. For landless women in particular, an additional pressure is gendered responsibilities in household food provisioning, as well as subjectivities linked to norms of being good wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. To reduce agriculture’s vulnerability to flooding, farmers often raise artificial levees on the floodplain or alter fields to drain water more quickly. The maladaptive outcomes of these practices are assessed in the paper, including rebounding vulnerability, shifting vulnerability, and destroying common pool resources. Ultimately, the paper makes two broader contributions. First, it demonstrates the importance in maladaptation analysis of paying attention to gendered subjectivities and the intersection with other social categories that can create heightened vulnerability. Second, the paper emphasizes how the causal structures of vulnerability need to form the foundation upon which maladaptation experiences are examined.