When Governing Sustainability Transformations Turn Regressive and Plural Arrangements That Contest Them- The Battle Over Seed Legislative Reform in Ghana

The IPCC recommends transformative sustainable agricultural policymaking to build resilience and empower vulnerable communities worldwide. Yet, there is considerable debate about how just-sustainable transformations should occur and be governed. Some scholars advocate for swift, top-down, reformist approaches that are centrally planned and guided by mainly scientific evidence, while others emphasize bottom-up, grassroots-led and more radical change based on local knowledge and ontologies. Similar debates appear in agricultural climate change adaptation governance scholarship. Some advocate for top-down, technology-driven agricultural development interventions, while others push for community-based agroecological models that are less scalable. At the core of these debates is seed governance, which includes drought and pest-resistant, short-duration, and high-yielding crop varieties. This study uses qualitative research and discursive analysis of plant breeding legislative reforms in Ghana to show how agricultural transformations can happen incrementally amidst contestations. Transformations can also move in regressive directions, leading to outcomes that are not just, and therefore, not sustainable. Our case finds that seed governance reform in Ghana allows for genetically modified (GM) seeds, which a part of wider movements towards transformations in land use and rural, life from subsistence, family farming towards more commerce and growth in Ghana. We argue that the top-down processes of reforms are at odds with bottom-up seed governance processes well established in Ghana. The plural governance arrangements of resources (statutory and customary) in Ghana slowed a top-down regressive transformation, offering insights into the depth and possibility of bottom-up governance for just-sustainability transformations.