Imogen Bellwood-HowardInstitute of Development Studies
Imogen Bellwood-Howard
PhD
About
49
Publications
16,745
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313
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
My interdisciplinary work relates to food and agriculture, considering environmental interactions in the light of diverse theoretical perspectives such as agroecology, socioecological systems theory, political ecology and science and technology studies. I use mixed methods, combining soil sampling, GIS and surveys with qualitative interviews and observation and CAQDAS. Beyond research, I am committed to engagement and producing outputs legible to research participants as well as policy actors.
Additional affiliations
October 2012 - May 2013
October 2012 - May 2013
'This is Rubbish' Community Interest Company
Position
- Research Consultant
January 2012 - March 2012
Publications
Publications (49)
L'art a été utilisé pour communiquer les préoccupations environnementales dans les pays sahéliens. Néanmoins, le dialogue dirigé par les arts entre les acteurs politiques et les citoyens est cependant rare, bien qu'il ait le potentiel de trouver des solutions aux problèmes socio-environnementaux complexes. Il est indispensable d'exploiter ce potent...
Citizen and policy groups address environmental challenges in the Sahel, but rarely together. In Sahelian West Africa, including in Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali, artists and citizens have used protest art to make their voices heard, in contexts where this can carry risks of conflict with authorities. Artists sometimes act as engaged citizens, who...
Reliance on groundwater in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing and expected to rise as surface water resource variability increases under climate change. Major questions remain about how groundwater will be used, and who informs these decisions. We represent different visions of groundwater use by ‘pathways’: politically and environmentally embedded soci...
This brief presents a summary of key findings from a multi-country study of social differentiation in African agricultural value chains in the context of COVID-19. It aims to understand how trends in the politics and participation of different actors in agriculture have contributed to patterns of social differentiation, and how these patterns have...
African policymaking has turned to agricultural commercialisation as an engine of growth in the 21st century. But the effects have not been the same for everyone, entrenching long-term social difference based on gender, wealth, age and generation, ethnicity and citizenship. Social differentiation within commercial agriculture is shaped by power dyn...
Since the structural adjustment policies of the 1980s, policymaking at a national and continental level has increasingly turned to agricultural commercialisation as the foundation for Africa’s long-term nutrition and food security. However, socio-economic inequalities, land tenure and food insecurity, as well as livelihood and income precarities re...
Seasonality influences African informal agricultural markets, but existing literature inadequately explores its interactions with market actors' social relations and livelihood outcomes. Thus, agricultural commercialisation policy ineffectively supports such actors to manage seasonality. Across Bamako, Ouagadougou and Tamale, we conducted interview...
Children work throughout the Lake Volta fisheries value chain. It is commonly assumed most have been trafficked. Research and advocacy has focused on dangers to young boys harvesting fish, and poverty as a driver, precluding attention to harms experienced by non-trafficked children, girls’ experiences and work-education dynamics. More work is neede...
Agroecology is increasingly recognized within mainstream development. Yet, this is controversial, due to disagreement over what it does and should mean. This article takes a ‘knowledge politics’ approach to show how different understandings of agroecology create contexts where contrasting agricultural development narratives thrive, albeit often uni...
The concept of forest landscape restoration (FLR) is being widely adopted around the globe by governmental, non‐governmental agencies, and the private sector, all of whom see FLR as an approach that contributes to multiple global sustainability goals. Originally, FLR was designed with a clearly integrative dimension across sectors, stakeholders, sp...
Markets are critical in connecting small towns with agricultural activities in their rural hinterland. This paper presents data from north-eastern Ghana on grain marketing and trade flows, combined with data on expansion of built and transport infrastructure in five linked towns of a periodic market system. Rurally sourced goods flow through histor...
Farmers, researchers and extension officers in Northern Ghana encounter productivity problems, such as striga, acidity, hardpan and bochaa (a Dagbani word denoting low productivity). We undertook a mainly qualitative study using interviews, focus groups and a workshop to investigate, from a science and technology studies perspective, the intersecti...
This article uses the example of Tamale, Ghana, to examine urban food system governance, with a focus on food production. Urban and peri-urban agriculture is common in West Africa, and supports food security and livelihoods globally. The analysis is grounded in the notion of everyday governance as a process co-performed by governors and subjects. I...
Urban agriculture is characterized by fast rotation of cropping cycles and high inputs and outputs on relatively small areas of land. Depletion of soil organic carbon and low nutrient use efficiency are severe agricultural constraints in the sandy soils of West Africa. We hypothesized that such an intensive system would provide ideal preconditions...
Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) is a well-researched landscape component, but there is a need to extend the quantitative database on West Africa as well as to explain how UPA contributes to food systems differently across locations. We therefore performed a quantitative survey of Tamale, Ghana, and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, using a spatiall...
Agriculture remains the backbone of most African economies, yet land degradation severely hampers agricultural productivity. Over the last decades, scientists and development practitioners have advocated integrated soil fertility management (ISFM) practices to improve soil fertility. However, their adoption rates are low, partly because many farmer...
Urban vegetable production is an intensive agricultural strategy through which urban dwellers secure income and improve their livelihoods. An ethnographic study was conducted in Tamale, Northern Ghana, to understand whether vegetable gardening was a sustainable form of intensification. The study used an updated version of the Food and Agricultural...
Policy document on the implications of recent research, including that of the UrbanFoodPlus project, for urban agriculture in Ouagadougou. The document is one of the results of a series of stakeholder engagements in the city.
Solidarity in a competing world — fair use of resources.
Purpose
This chapter uses a feminist political ecology perspective to demonstrate how gender interacts with access to land as a re/productive resource in Tamale, a rapidly urbanizing city in West Africa. The study gives insight into the strategies that vulnerable groups employ to gain access to resources.
Methodology/approach
An ethnographic fiel...
Urban food system governance is especially complex, comprising of a dense configuration of heterogeneous interacting individuals, organisations and institutions. We conceptualise this governance as a process. Within it, multiple state, customary, civil society and vernacular institutions, with different objectives, interact as they attempt to exert...
Contemporary African agricultural policy embodies the African Green Revolution's drive towards modernisation and commercialisation. Agroecologists have criticised this movement on ecological, social and political grounds. Northern Ghanaian fertiliser credit schemes provide a good example through which these critiques can be examined in a context wh...
A document summarising a series of policy workshop and making policy reccomendations based on a summary of existing research on urban and peri-urban agriculture in Tamale, Northern Ghana
Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) is an integral part of West African life. Descriptive, qualitative research has proliferated, but there have been few randomly sampled surveys of West African UPA. The GlobE - UrbanFoodPlus (UFP) project undertook such a survey in 2013 in Tamale (Ghana) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). The aim was to provide a...
Urban and peri-urban agriculture are dynamic niche activities that take advantage of urban connectivity and a complex socio-political environment. It has been advocated by many researchers as a means to improve food security. Vegetable production, a strand of urban agriculture, doubles as a source of food and income for many urban dwellers, especia...
Food insecurity is a global problem particularly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. Here,
urban agriculture has rarely been formalized and institutional conflict often threatens the
possibilities for it to contribute to food security. Yet this case study finds that in Tamale,
northern Ghana, conflict between institutions has inadvertently led to inno...
Dry season vegetable cultivation provides urban dwellers in Tamale, with an opportunity to produce food and generate income. They have high profit margins due to close proximity to markets and transport. Farming is carried out in open spaces around lowlands were there are wells, gutters, dugouts, streams and drains. This paper explores why cabbage...
Vegetable cultivation needs the combination of the hand and tools, and increasingly mechanization. This paper explores how this happens in urban agriculture in Tamale, Northern Ghana. Here, farmers grow vegetables such as okra, amaranthus, cabbage, jute mallow, lettuce, cowpea leaves and pepper for subsistence and/or commercial purposes. In this co...
Urban backyard gardening in developing countries is commonly characterised as mainly subsistence-oriented 'niche farming', whereas open space farming tends to be perceived as market-focused (Drechsel et al. 2006; Moustier & Danso 2006). However, few studies have systematically analysed the role of backyard gardening in urban and peri-urban food sup...
Resilience is the ability to absorb shocks without an entire system change. Farmers develop adaption mechanisms that enhance their resilience to sudden changes that occur in their dynamic environment. We describe some examples of farmers’ practice that illustrate how they have developed resilience to climate variability. We focus on vegetable farme...
The African Green Revolution (AGR) describes a drive by governments and international philanthropic and research organizations to raise agricultural production through Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) and improved access to input and output markets. This article draws on data from three studies that took place in Northern Ghana as the AG...
Urban farming in Tamale metropolis could potentially contribute to national development by improving food security and nutrition, developing local markets and generating income as a whole. However, farmers are constrained by infrastructural factors and poor governance. A qualitative ethnographic study is underway to investigate these constraints an...
Urban farming in Tamale metropolis could potentially contribute to national development by improving nutrition, developing local markets and generating income. However, farmers are constrained by infrastructural factors. A qualitative ethnographic study is underway to investigate these constraints and the opportunities that spring from their resolu...
Mobile phones can alleviate some of the burdens associated with travel and transport in Sub-Saharan Africa. The nuances in this relationship can be illustrated agricultural cameos from a Dagomba village in northern Ghana, where they have inspired innovation as well as causing extra journeys and accentuating power differences between villagers.
Mobi...
Despite describing a decline in soil fertility, Northern Ghanaian smallholders have not universally adopted use of organic, sustainable soil amendments such as compost. Farmers' decisions about whether to use compost depend on their need and ability to do so. The agroecological context of a single rainfall season with low soil organic matter means...
The African Green Revolution (AGR) builds on the ‘old’ GR’s technologist approach but extends it to include institutional solutions like credit. In Ghana, associations offering chemical fertiliser on credit to maize smallholder groups epitomise the AGR.
Research often finds that richer farmers practice more sustainable agriculture, applying more in...
Organic amendments such as compost are key to sustainable soil fertility management, but their use is constrained by a lack of appropriate vehicles with which to transport them to the fields. Farmers in the Northern Ghanaian Guinea Savanna tested individually owned headpans and bicycles, group-owned wheelbarrows and donkey carts, and hired handtruc...
Designing investigative skills sessions for key stage 5 students based on field research in the Ghanaian savannah prompted reflection on the similarities and differences in the ways farmers and students learned about and applied scientific methodology. Circumstantial constraints mean that farmers' experiments were less controlled than those student...
Social and ecological concerns interact nowhere more than in agroecosystems. It follows that agricultural research must use interdisciplinary methods. This paper assesses the benefits of participant observation, an ethnographic technique, in agroecosystem analysis, illustrating its use in soil fertility management (SFM) research in the Ghanaian sav...
Research, dissemination and wider learning are interlinked activities in agricultural development. This paper describes and evaluates five visual techniques that were used for data generation and dissemination in a Soil Fertility Management project involving non-literate farmers in Dagbon. It illustrates that combining many such methods in an itera...
Growing populations in peri-urban West Africa reduce land availability and associated soil fertility, representing a decline in natural capital. Smallholder farmers respond to this with different strategies, each requiring various types of capital, described in the livelihoods approach to development as physical, financial, human and social. Global...
Projects
Projects (9)
The project connects artists, citizen activists, policymakers and implementers and researchers from Senegal, Ghana, Mauritania, Mali and Kenya, to discover whether and how the arts may be used as a channel for dialogue between these diverse actor groups. Former projects found that, in these contexts, artistic and creative activities tended to be used as a one-way mode of communication about environmental issues. This project uses experimental arts-based workshops to understand whether such communication can link to multi-actor dialogue.
This project aims to understand how livestock and agricultural commercialisation policy in Africa can be better connected to research on the food cultures of agropastoralist people.
This networking activity convenes research, policy, cultural and community engagement organisations from across Sahelian Francophone West Africa. It seeks to understand whether the arts and cultural activities can act as a mode through which citizen and policy actors can communicate, co-creating understanding about environmental issues.
The project works with citizen and advocacy groups, policy actors and artists from across Senegal, Mauritania and Mali, to explore the different forms of ‘storytelling’ tradition which exist in their contexts. Practical workshops experimented with these techniques, while the project creates a regional network which will set out the agenda for future research in this domain.
