Forest Governance and Conflict Management: Understanding forest-related livelihood conflicts from different stakeholders’ perspectives.

Natural resource management literature has documented three paradigm shifts over the past decade: from co-management to adaptive co-management and adaptive governance respectively and, more recently, towards landscape governance. The latter is conceived as a governance approach towards negotiated land use at the landscape level to deal with global challenges such as food insecurity, climate change and biodiversity loss. There is not a lot of clarity about how co-management systems could actually evolve into landscape governance. This paper aims to address the gap by exploring how a stalled co-management system for the reforestation of degraded forest areas—the modified taungya system (MTS) in Ghana—could be revitalised and redesigned as a landscape approach. Drawing on case studies and expert consultation, the performance of the national MTS and the MTS under the Community Forestry Management Project is reviewed with regard to five principles (integrated approach, multi-stakeholder negotiation, polycentric governance, continual learning and adaptive capacity) and three enabling conditions (social capital, bridging organisations and long-term funding) distilled from the literature. The authors conclude that some of these principles and conditions were met under the Community Forestry Management Project, but that continual learning, transcending jurisdictional boundaries, developing adaptive capacity, and long-term funding and benefits still pose challenges.

Conflicts over forests and trees are the order of the day in Ghana’s high forest zone. This not only adversely affects local people’s livelihoods but also complicates good forest governance. Conflict management should therefore be recognised as a key building block of forest governance, argues Mercy Derkyi in her PhD thesis entitled 'Fighting over forest – Interactive governance of conflicts over forest and tree resources in Ghana's high forest zone’.

Despite rapid deforestation and biodiversity loss in Ghana’s High Forest Zone, non-timber forest products (NTFPs) still contribute substantially to people’s cash and non-cash incomes. However, the over-exploitation of forest resources and a lack of local management will continue to lead to forest degradation and lost species. This poses several challenges for forest governance.

Timber contributes about 6% to Ghana’s Gross National Product and 11% to its export earnings and therefore plays an important role in Ghana’s economy. It also creates about 100,000 jobs through direct employment in the legal timber industry and an estimated 130,000 jobs in chainsaw milling. The issue of how timber contributes to rural livelihoods is increasingly gathering interest among forest actors in Ghana in view of the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) between Ghana and the EU to
combat illegal logging. This infosheet examines the role of naturally grown timber in rural people’s livelihoods.

Having lost 90% of its tropical rainforest in fewer than 50 years, reforestation schemes are becoming increasingly important in Ghana as a  means of restoring tree cover and sources of livelihoods. These schemes may also become important in Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD). This infosheet provides an overview of the various schemes and the actors and
livelihood benefits associated with them.
 

Who are involved in forest governance and use, and what are their roles and interests? This infosheet provides a brief description of the actors in the Ghana’s High Forest Zone. It results from a study undertaken by researchers from the  Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) and the University of Amsterdam (UvA).