Nourishing the nexus: system analysis of the enablers and barriers in the Ghanaian soil health system

Abstract Despite decades of interventions, soil degradation in Ghana persists, raising policy concerns about the effectiveness of current approaches, which have largely focused on fertilizer use and its on-farm adoption. This underscores the need for a broader, systemic understanding of the enablers and barriers within the Ghanaian soil health system, and how soil health can be more effectively managed. This study looks at soil health management from a socio-technical perspective and applies the multilevel perspective (MLP), combined with a qualitative exploratory case study, to analyze the features and interactions in the Ghanaian soil health system. In doing so, we examine the system’s opportunities and constraints, as well as the forms of balanced socio-technical solutions that may be required to better manage soil health. We find that internal weaknesses and dysfunctions within the soil health system, compounded by broader and external pressures such as global shocks, demographic change, and macroeconomic trends, have created space for the emergence of new institutional and technical initiatives across different parts of the system. However, these initiatives often fail to take root or scale, leaving the core challenges in the system unresolved. This is largely because the initiatives are introduced in a top-down, fragmented and uncoordinated manner, making them poorly aligned with the contextual nuances and farmer realities. Also, the initiatives are unsupported by the institutional frameworks needed to sustain them to thrive. In view of this, we argue that improving soil health may require combining emerging initiatives into integrated, farmer-responsive packages that work together to address the multiple, interconnected problems within soil health systems.