Examining the powers decentralized to community resource management areas in Ghana

Decentralizing forest control to community-based groups is a widely promoted form of governance around the world. Community Resource Management Areas (CREMAs) in Ghana, a form of forest decentralization, is a relatively recent government strategy to reduce forest loss, promote restoration, and improve local control and participation in resource management. This paper examines the powers devolved to CREMAs in Ghana, using a political ecology lens. Using a variety of qualitative research methods, the paper found that CREMAs receive limited powers from the State and these powers mainly restrict local access to resources, an action the State has often failed at. The results also suggest that CREMAs impose responsibility on local people without accompanying resources and often at the expense of security and safety of local volunteer enforcers. The findings also highlight the lack of coherence between forest decentralization and exiting political decentralization processes; the incoherence between the different institutional regulations for CREMAs; and tensions between new and traditional forms of local resource governance. The study suggests that critical approaches to evaluating the performance of decentralized regimes could be a useful approach to understanding the drivers of vulnerability among local resource users, dependents, and their institutions.