Ghana is cocoa, carbon is Ghana: Sustaining cocoa landscapes and governing forest livelihoods through agri-environmental extension

The postcolonial landscapes of West Africa are simultaneously sites of cultural reproduction and environmental degradation; places where exploited and commodified landscapes have provided resources for centuries-old commodity chains and revenues for building new nation states. This dissertation research is concerned with how these anthropogenic landscapes are produced, and persistently reproduced, surviving successive developmental and resource governance regimes. It examines the paradigmatic case of cocoa-forest mosaics in Ghana, West Africa, where aging cocoa farms and cocoa farmers remain rooted in tropical commodity crop chains and the institutional arrangements that have sustained them.;The Republic of Ghana was built on revenues extracted from the cocoa sector, and has struggled to maintain its position as one of the world's largest cocoa producers in a volatile world market. Accelerated growth of the cocoa sector remains central to the Ghana Vision 2020 plan to achieve a balanced economy and middle income status by the year 2020. At the same time, Ghana is losing forests at a rate of 2% (135,000 hectares) each year to agricultural extensification and timber extraction along the same frontiers where cocoa production has a real potential to expand. Concurrence of stagnant cocoa yields amidst crisis narratives about threats of deforestation and climate change have placed cocoa farms and cocoa farmers at the center of environmental governance debates in national and international arenas.;This dissertation research examines the production of landscapes from managerial, ontological and ecological perspectives. The work draws from literatures on land and resource governance, social constructions of nature, the political ecology of renewable resource management, and landscape perception. The landscape of interest in this case is a cocoa-producing area surrounding a national wildlife park in Ghana that has been designated as a pilot project by the secretariat of the National Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation in developing countries (REDD+) Technical Working Group. The research examines the institutional terrain and resource management practices that have together produced cocoa-forest mosaics and sustainability discourses in Ghana. The research design was conceived as an ethnographic study of extension practice in the cocoa, forestry, and conservation sectors at the national, regional, and district levels.;The dissertation chapters discuss the ways in which ideas about mixed cocoa-forest landscapes, extension pedagogy, and institutional norms both sustain the cocoa sector and maintain current land use patterns. The chapters describe efforts to launch farmer business training, green certification initiatives, and REDD+ pilot projects with cocoa smallholders through reformed agricultural extension models and market-oriented conservation approaches. Through this paradigmatic case, I will reposition revised and revitalized cocoa and conservation extension services as common modes of environmental governance, now converging around green market-driven approaches to manage forest landscapes and rural livelihoods through public-private-partnerships and transnational agreements for more 'sustainable' tropical commodity crops.