Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

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The present report sets out in detail:
1. the resource constraints which condition the livelihoods of small farmers in the Brong Ahafo,
and the decision-making processes through which they respond to these constraints,
differentiating the responses of different classes of resource user (poor and rich men and
women, indigenes and migrants);
2. the capacities and limitations of the existing institutions mediating natural resource policy at
the district level;
Purpose-level OVI-1 has thus been met (“Knowledge of institutions mediating policy
[decentralised local government/agriculture and forest-related institutions] updated, identifying
gaps and key constraints”).
A strategy has been defined to re-orient rural policy to the interests of the small farmers, in line
with OVI-2 (“Research topics on strategies of participatory management aimed at enhancing the
livelihoods of the poor and marginal at the FAI investigated and elaborated with a view to
informing future FAI calls on Ghana and elsewhere”). This is based on a critique of existing
research strategies, their economic assumptions, and their technology-transfer orientation. Their
tendency to subordinate participatory principles to external goals is likewise problematized.
While the details of the proposed strategy are specific to the context of the Brong Ahafo, the
principles on which it is founded are of wider relevance, and pertinent to conditions elsewhere in
Ghana and beyond.
The strategy here presented acknowledges the social complexity of natural resource systems at
the FAI in the Brong Ahafo, and the ease with which the interests of the poor and marginal
(particularly women, and different classes of indigenes and migrants) can be marginalised within
the policy process. The way forward must therefore involve a process of dialogue and
negotiation, rather than technological prescription. A sceptical attitude is also required as regards
the discourses which dominate the environmental fora at local, district and national levels, which
are easily captured by those with power in society. Evidence needs to be placed in appropriate
forms before all the resource users, to allow them to make their own demands on policy-makers.
Supporting the development of institutions of local origin and under local ownership will be
critical to this endeavour.
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