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

这个博士论文项目考虑了推广机构和农民的互动愿景塑造景观的方式，以及这种塑造如何影响相同景观的未来使用。 广义的扩展是指在社区和提供服务或信息的机构之间建立联系的干预方案。农业和保护推广服务还负责根据其特定机构的目标和任务管理景观。这些服务旨在通过农民对景观采取行动。该项目的目标是研究多种推广服务如何结合在一起，以产生农村景观，从而影响可能的农业生态系统未来的范围。它提出了一种审慎的土地使用规划的方法，旨在解决在推广服务的管理中日益强调环境与推广作为参与性发展的中介之间的明显矛盾。该项目审查了针对生活在加纳高山森林边缘的可可种植者的推广干预案例。每一组行动者的动机都是对当前形势的不同想法和他们对未来的不同愿景。研究设计将整合推广实践的人种学研究与生物物理实地数据和情景分析，以研究可可林景观如何从多个方面产生：（1）当前景观的配置;（2）期望的未来景观;（3）建议的土地最佳管理做法。生物物理场数据将被用作构建景观可视化的经验基础，以说明每个替代方案。这项研究的长期成果将为正在进行的森林治理辩论中的努力提供信息，以创造多样化和多功能的可可景观。加纳是撒哈拉以南非洲首批获得联合国关于降低发展中国家因森林砍伐和退化所产生的排放的合作方案批准的国家之一（REDD+），目前正在积极征求试点项目，以干预可可景观的生产。与此同时，加纳的愿景是到2020年实现中等收入地位，其经济依赖于其森林资源。该项目分析了加纳可可带经济和领土冲突中可可、木材和碳的兼容生态的制度地形。这项研究将展示加纳的多重、平行和相互冲突的推广工作实际上是如何推动碎片化，并将综合农林分成单独的资源领域进行干预的。它还提供了一个建设性的方法来研究推广服务和种植者如何通过他们的干预措施产生景观，同时推进一种方法，使基线景观配置和理想的未来景观相互理解的多利益攸关方的土地使用规划。该项目是及时的，对有利于穷人的气候变化减缓战略和撒哈拉以南非洲森林边缘社区的多用途规划具有影响。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该项目将提供支持，使研究生能够建立一个独立的研究生涯。

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.