Doctoral Dissertation Research: On the Roles of Agricultural and Conservation Extension in Producing Landscapes: Visioning Alternative Scenarios for the Ghanaian Cocoa Belt

Clark University, Worcester MA

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation project considers the ways in which interacting visions of extension agents and farmers have shaped the landscape and how this shaping impacts future use of the same landscapes. Extension, broadly defined, refers to intervention programs that liaise between communities and institutions that provide services or information. Agricultural and conservation extension services are additionally tasked with managing landscapes in accordance with the goals and missions of their particular agencies. Such services are designed to work through farmers to act on the landscape. The objective of this project is to study how a plurality of extension services come together to produce rural landscapes, and so influence the range of possible agro-ecosystem futures. It suggests an approach to deliberative land-use planning that aims to resolve the apparent contradiction between the increased environmental emphasis in the governance of extension services and extension as an intermediary for participatory development. The project examines the case of extension interventions targeted at cacao farmers living on the fringes of Ghana's high forests. Each set of actors is motivated by different ideas about the present landscape and their visions for alternative futures. The research design will integrate an ethnographic study of extension practice with biophysical field data and scenario analysis in order to study how cacao-forest landscapes are produced from multiple (1) configurations of the current landscape; (2) desired future landscapes; and (3) recommended best management practices of the land. Biophysical field data will be used as an empirical basis for constructing landscape visualizations to illustrate each of the alternative scenarios. The long-term outcomes of this research would inform efforts within the ongoing forest governance debate to produce diverse and multifunctional cacao landscapes. Ghana is among the first countries in sub-Saharan Africa to receive readiness approval in the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in developing countries (REDD-plus) and is now actively soliciting pilot projects to intervene in the production of cacao landscapes. At the same time, Ghana is set on a vision to achieve middle-income status by the year 2020 with an economy that depends on its forest resources. This project analyzes the institutional terrain that has brought the compatible ecologies of cacao, timber, and now, carbon into economic and territorial conflict in the Ghanaian cacao belt. The research will demonstrate how multiple, parallel, and conflicting extension efforts in Ghana can, in fact, drive fragmentation and divide integrated agroforests into separate resource domains for intervention. It also offers a constructive approach for studying how extension services and growers produce landscapes through their interventions, while advancing a methodology for rendering baseline landscape configurations and desirable future landscapes mutually intelligible for multi-stakeholder land-use planning. The project is timely and has implications for pro-poor climate change mitigation strategies and multipurpose planning for forest fringe communities in sub-Saharan Africa. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this project will provide support to enable a graduate student to establish an independent research career.