Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

Annex 3: 13
the needs of their constituencies. Environmental policy tends to be transmitted to the Districts as a
set of prescriptions which Assembly Members and Unit Committees are required to implement.
For instance, the Bye-Laws against Bush Fires enacted by the Wenchi Traditional Area with
sanction from the Regional Co-ordinating Council require the Unit Committees and
‘Assemblyman’, alongside the chief of the village, the chief hunter, and ‘a woman’ (unspecified) to set
up a committee to supervise Fire Volunteers in implementing the bye-laws. There are no
provisions for Assembly Members and Unit Committees to set up a consultative community fora to
examine the problem of fire and devise suitable solutions. There are also few avenues through
which Assembly Members and Unit Committees can get access to dispassionate information on the
environment, since most information is disseminated to the districts in a rhetorical and
prescriptive form defining a series of necessary actions which need to be taken to preserve the
environment and regulate its utilisation by the rural population.
Given these constraints the main options open to Assembly Members and Unit Committees are to:
1. act as spokespersons for government environmental policy and advocate the relentless
implementation of bye-laws at the risk of unpopularity and future electoral failure;
OR:
2. ignore environmental policy and implement it half-heartedly;
OR:
3. take advantage of the considerable confusion, conflicting responsibilities of different
authorities and lack of accountability to community organisations to engage in rent-seeking
behaviour.
Linkages and consultation mechanisms to bring together Assembly Members, Unit Committees
and the rural inhabitants are poorly developed. In the survey of farmers, 54 percent of the
respondents claimed that they did not attend meetings with the Assembly Member or Unit
Committee and 79 percent felt that the Assembly Member and Unit Committee did not perform
useful development functions.
Of the 21 percent who felt the Assembly Member and Unit Committee were of some help, the
overwhelming majority (17 percent of respondents) saw their role as the provision of social
services. Other useful functions ascribed included the re-gravelling of roads (two percent),