Victoria Maguire-Rajpaul

Understanding West African cocoa smallholders' adaption to drought: assessing interactions between institutions, poverty and resilience

Victoria’s sustainable agriculture research is at the nexus of climate adaptation, poverty, food security, and political ecology. Broadly, her research asks: how can food and forest challenges be resiliently met with the least cost to human suffering, biodiversity, ecosystem maintenance, and tree cover?

For her Masters, she analysed the merits of socio-environmental certification for Brazilian coffee cultivation, and sustainable governance of cattle grazing to spare the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Her current DPhil research focuses on the commodity crop of cocoa. Through fieldwork in West African cocoa communities, she explores how cocoa smallholders cope with, and adapt to, climate shocks. Her DPhil thesis examines how and to what extent deforestation, socio-economic, and governance factors shape cocoa smallholders' adaptation.

Victoria founded and ran social enterprises in Côte d’Ivoire and Mozambique. She has researched at the London School of Economics, the Swedish International Development Agency, and for CCAFS (Climate Change, Agriculture, & Food Security). She received an MA in Economic Sociology from Trinity College Dublin, and an MPhil in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford.

Journal Articles

• McDermott, C.L., Montana, J., Bennett, A., Gueiros, C., Hamilton, R., Hirons, M., Maguire-Rajpaul, V.A., Parry, E. and Picot, L. (2022) Transforming land use governance: Global targets without equity miss the mark. Environmental Policy and Governance.
• Maguire-Rajpaul, V.A., Sandbrook, C., McDermott, C. and Hirons, M.A. (2021) Climate-Smart Cocoa Governance Risks Entrenching Old Hegemonies in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana: A Multiple Environmentality Analysis. Geoforum.
• Khatun, K., Maguire-Rajpaul, V., Asante, E. and McDermott, C.L. (2020) From agroforestry to agroindustry: Smallholder access to benefits from oil palm in Ghana and the implications for sustainability certification. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems: Land, Livelihoods and Food Security, 4(29).
• Maguire-Rajpaul, V.A., Khatun, K. and Hirons, M.A. (2020) Agricultural information's impact on the adaptive capacity of Ghana's smallholder cocoa farmers. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 4(28).
• Hajjar, R., Newton, P., Adshead, D., Bogaerts, M., Maguire-Rajpaul, V.A., Pinto, L.F.G., McDermott, C.L., Milder, J.C., Wollenberg, E. and Agrawal, A. (2019) Scaling up sustainability in commodity agriculture: Transferability of governance mechanisms across the coffee and cattle sectors in Brazil. Journal of Cleaner Production, 206: 124-132.
• Liang, B., Dahlsjö, C.A.L., Maguire-Rajpaul, V., Malhi, Y. and Liu, S. (2019) Modelling error evaluation of ground observed vegetation parameters. IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.
• Maguire-Rajpaul, V., Rajpaul, C.L., McDermott, C.L. and Pinto, G. (2018) Coffee certification in Brazil: compliance with social standards and its implications for social equity. Environment, Development and Sustainability: 1-30.
• Maguire-Rajpaul, V.A., Galuchi, T., Nery Alves Pinto, H. and McDermott, C. (2016) How Brazil's sustainable cattle schemes could beef up to conserve forests and sustainable rural livelihoods. CCAFS Working Paper no. 148.
• Pinto, L.F.G., Hajjar, R., Newton, P., Agrawal, A., Adshead, D., Bini, D., Bogaerts, M., Cirhigiri, L., Maguire-Rajpaul, V.A., Gonzáles-Chaves, A. and McDermott, C. (2016) Transitioning to more sustainable, low-emissions agriculture in Brazil. CCAFS Info. Note.