Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

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4.1.2 The context of environmental decision-making in the Brong Ahafo
The present study took as one of its preliminary objectives, the characterisation of the narratives
which guide environmental decision-making in the Brong Ahafo region, particularly among the
key decision makers at District Assembly and Unit Committee levels, and in the public support
agencies.
Among the striking features of these narratives are their simplicity, uniformity, and largely
external origins. Perceptions of environmental change within the region over the last two decades
have become intertwined with received wisdom about small farmer practices (most of it of
colonial origins) to give rise to a set of ‘crisis narratives’. These accord well with recent
international discourse about environmental decline in Africa. They stress such themes as:
! The destructiveness and non-sustainability of traditional agriculture, particularly swidden
practices (‘slash and burn’).
! The destructive effects of bush fires; the alleged anthropogenic origins of the devastating
bushfires which swept through Ghana and the West African sub-region in 1983, and the
resulting need for major changes in small farmer practices.
! The impending crisis in agriculture which is being caused by rampant population growth,
resulting in environmental problems (shortening fallows and land degradation) and food
security decline, both of which imply the need for a rapid transformation in traditional
agriculture, through intensification of land use. 1
There is little to suggest that such crisis narratives have any substantive connection with the
realities of farming in the Brong-Ahafo. They are not, indeed, evidence-based to any appreciable
extent. Rather they are rooted in external perceptions and interests, and are sustained by a number
of features of the local political environment. These include, most notably:
! The paucity of sources of information for environmental decision-making;
! The external dependence, both intellectually and in terms of resources, of the central
extension services;
! The social complexity of the small farmer population, and the fact that conflicts over natural
resources tend to be overlaid with important social dimensions;
1. Throughout this report, ‘intensification’ is used in the conventional sense, to refer to increases in the
quantity of other factors, as compared to a relatively fixed area of land (see, for example, Ellis, 1988: 196).
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