Exit, voice, and adaptive livelihood diversification: Reframing coffee abandonment as transformative climate adaptation in East Africa

Abstract

Climate change adaptation discourse has a habit of casting smallholder farmers as passive recipients of interventions designed to keep them producing for global market demand. This framing obscures both farmer agency and the power relations embedded in sustainability governance. Drawing on 385 semi-structured interviews with coffee farmers, cooperative leaders, and development officials in Tanzania and Ethiopia, we apply Hirschman (1970) exit-voice-loyalty framework to agricultural livelihoods, distinguishing exit from coffee from hedging within it. Exit, we demonstrate, is a reasonable response when voice proves futile and when broken institutional promises erode the relational foundations of loyalty. Our findings reveal farmers exercising agency by hedging within coffee through livestock, trade, and intercropped food crops, or by leaving it for khat, maize, and horticulture, in response to low prices, regulatory burdens, and climate variability. Critically, we document how external actors, particularly exporters and government officials, actively discourage exit, exposing how 'climate smart' framings often serve supply chain security rather than farmer wellbeing. By reframing coffee abandonment from developmental failure to transformative adaptation, we contribute to adaptation, political ecology, and environmental justice scholarship, and we ask whose interests sustainability interventions actually serve. Recognising exit as legitimate adaptation demands a rethinking of who holds power in sustainability governance, and whose interests that power serves.