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相互作用的愿景塑造景观的方式，以及这种塑造如何影响未来对相同景观的利用。广义上的延伸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部门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起来形成农村景观，从而影响农业生态系统未来可能出现的范围。它提出了一种审议性土地使用规划的办法，目的是解决在管理推广服务方面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。该项目考察了针对生活在加纳高林区边缘的可可种植者的推广干预措施。每一组参与者的动机都是对当前形势的不同看法，以及他们对不同未来的愿景。研究设计将整合推广实践的民族志研究、生物物理现场数据和情景分析，以研究可可林景观如何从当前景观的多种配置中产生；(2)期望的未来景观；(3)推荐土地最佳管理实践。生物物理场数据将被用作构建景观可视化的经验基础，以说明每个备选方案。这项研究的长期成果将为正在进行的森林治理辩论提供信息，以创造多样化和多功能的可可景观。加纳是联合国减少发展中国家毁林和退化造成的排放合作方案（REDD-plus）中首批获得准备批准的撒哈拉以南非洲国家之一，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年达到中等收入水平，经济依赖森林资源。本项目分析了制度地形，这些地形将可可、木材和碳的相容生态带入了加纳可可带的经济和领土冲突中。该研究将证明，在加纳，多重、平行和相互冲突的推广工作实际上如何推动碎片化，并将综合农林业划分为单独的资源领域进行干预。它还为研究推广服务和种植者如何通过干预产生景观提供了建设性的方法，同时为多利益相关者土地利用规划提供了一种方法，使基线景观配置和理想的未来景观相互理解。该项目是及时的，对撒哈拉以南非洲的扶贫气候变化缓解战略和森林边缘社区的多用途规划具有影响。作为博士论文研究进步奖，该项目将为研究生建立独立的研究生涯提供支持。

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.