Poverty Dimensions of Public Governance and Forest Management ...

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3. The ways in which multiple stakeholder platforms and networks for rural producers might be
encouraged, so as to facilitate a process of innovation, and encourage rural communities to
act as agents of policy reform.
4. The means by which district and national policy managers can learn from developments
outside of the existing national policy framework, and incorporate these processes into
decision making in ways that broaden the potential for policy intervention by local-level
producers.
5. The institutional linkages that need to be forged to facilitate a learning process, build
consensus and integrate environmental decision making into the policy process.
The Scoping Study report makes proposals for these issues to be addressed in the substantive
phase of research. A draft logframe for the proposed project is included.
2. Background
This project aims to contribute to the NRSP FAI Programme Goal (of developing planning
strategies to sustain the livelihoods of poor people at the FAI) by, firstly, investigating in depth
the various livelihood strategies of rural resource users, and then scoping out new institutional
strategies for environmental management under administrative decentralisation. This is in a
situation of considerable cultural and agricultural complexity, and in a policy framework which is
still in process of development.
The social complexity of the forest-agriculture interface is a rather neglected factor in natural
resource management in Ghana. Though the historically high levels of population mobility and
land transactions, linked to short-term labour migration and long-term migrant settlement, have
been well documented nationally, they have not been given priority in most of the recent policyoriented
studies of land use at the forest-agriculture interface. For a number of reasons, this
represents a significant gap in the applied literature.
Firstly, farming systems in the forest-savanna ecotone are often complex and subject to
significant variation on ecological, social and economic grounds. The supporting vegetation
patterns in which these cropping systems emerged have themselves developed over long
historical periods, strongly influenced by anthropogenic forces. Many income sources are natural
resource based, and bring their practitioners into conflict with other users of the same resources
(charcoal being an important current example). The social context is a complex one, however, on
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