  The increasing availability of Earth Observation data could transform the use
and governance of African rural landscapes, with major implications for the
livelihoods and wellbeing of people living in those landscapes. Recent years
have seen a rapid increase in the development of EO data applications targeted
at stakeholders in African agricultural systems. But there is still relatively
little critical scholarship questioning how EO data are accessed, presented,
disseminated and used in different socio-political contexts, or of whether this
increases or decreases the wellbeing of poorer and marginalized peoples. We
highlight three neglected areas in existing EO-for-development research: (i)
the imaginaries of 'ideal' future landscapes informing deployments of EO data;
(ii) how power relationships in larger EO-for-development networks shape the
distribution of costs and benefits; and (iii) how these larger-scale political
dynamics interact with local-scale inequalities to influence the resilience of
marginalised peoples. We then propose a framework for critical
EO-for-development research drawing on recent thinking in critical data
studies, ICT4D and political ecology.
