Market innovation for sustainable soil health management in Ghana

Smallholder agriculture underpins food security, rural livelihoods, and economic transformation across sub-Saharan Africa, yet its sustainability is increasingly undermined by widespread soil degradation. Sustainable Soil Health Management (SSHM)—the integrated and responsible use of mineral fertilizers with organic and ecological practices—offers a pathway to restore soil productivity while enhancing resilience and environmental performance. Despite its well-documented agronomic and ecological benefits, SSHM adoption among smallholder farmers remains limited. Existing explanations have largely focused on farmer-level constraints such as awareness, attitudes, or resource endowments. This thesis reframes the problem as one of market system design, arguing that SSHM adoption depends fundamentally on how agricultural markets organize, coordinate, and align the inputs, services, incentives, and institutions required to make adoption feasible and rewarding for farmers.The thesis develops and applies a market innovation perspective, grounded in complexity theory and enriched by socio-technical transition thinking, behavioral analysis, and resource–capability perspectives, to examine how smallholder agricultural markets in Ghana can be intentionally transformed to support SSHM adoption. Markets are conceptualized as complex adaptive socio-technical systems whose evolution can be deliberately steered through coordinated reconfiguration of market functions, relationships, and governance arrangements.Four interlinked studies operationalize this framework. Chapter 2 advances a complexity-informed model of smallholder market transformation, reconceptualizing market change as an emergent, iterative process shaped by interaction, feedback, and resource recombination among stakeholders. Chapter 3 applies the multi-level perspective to analyze Ghana’s soil health system using 73 stakeholder interviews and six farmer focus groups. It shows that although policy and environmental pressures are fostering niche initiatives related to SSHM, these remain fragmented, top-down, and weakly aligned, limiting their scalability and systemic impact. Chapter 4 responds by conceptualizing these initiatives as components of farmer-centered incentive systems and empirically eliciting farmer preferences for them through a conjoint experiment with 744 farmers. Results show that farmers strongly prefer integrated bundles that combine inputs, finance, advisory, sustainability support, and coordination mechanisms over isolated or purely motivational incentives. Chapter 5 assesses the feasibility of implementing these farmer-preferred configurations through a market-envisioning study, combining quantitative willingness ratings and qualitative interviews to evaluate stakeholder motivation, opportunities, and capabilities to reconfigure their roles.Across the studies, the thesis demonstrates that SSHM adoption hinges not on isolated functions performed by market stakeholders but on their alignment and relational fit. While most functions to support SSHM exist in the market system, they operate in silos, creating coordination failures that undermine adoption. Effective SSHM scaling therefore requires deliberate orchestration across actors and levels. The thesis proposes a layered coordination architecture comprising macro-level policy alignment, meso-level orchestration led by ICT platforms, and micro-level delivery through intermediaries such as aggregators and service-linked credit arrangements.By integrating market innovation theory with empirical system diagnosis, design, and feasibility analysis, the thesis contributes a unified framework for transforming “thin” agricultural markets toward sustainable outcomes. Practically, it offers actionable design principles and collaboration pathways for policymakers, development agencies, and private actors seeking to embed sustainability within commercially viable smallholder market systems in Ghana and similar contexts.