Lessons from the past: a forest policy reform in Ghana through the feedback loop

Forest resource governance and institutional structures are dynamic and respond to emerging social-ecological contexts mostly ‘circumstantially.’ Using adaptive governance theory and a political systems model, this study adopts a forest restoration project in Ghana under the Modified Taungya System (MTS) (which picked cues from a previously ‘failed’ Traditional Taungya System) to contextualize how feedback loops and experiences reinforce institutional evolution and collaborative governance. MTS enables farmers cultivate annual food crops interspersed with commercial trees with varying benefit systems. The study highlights complex connections through causal loop diagrams to demonstrate that governance issues such as institutions on tenure arrangements, ownership regimes and benefit-sharing schemes remain crucial and have subsequent linkages to related forces that could either catalyze or crush forest restoration efforts. In the previous Traditional Taungya System, relevant governance issues were ignored rendering the system largely state-centric with a ‘demotivating’ ownership structure which alienated farmers from the economic benefits derived from sale of commercial trees. Farmers (main drivers of the project) were compelled to exhibit subtle tree-annihilation tendencies which finally led to a collapse of the system. With such lessons from the past, this study examines a subsequent Modified Taungya Model for the Pamu-Berekum Forest Restoration Project which has been more community-centric with robust institutional underpinning. Qualitative system dynamics through causal loops is used to demonstrate how elements of the institutional underpinning trigger subsequent critical success factors to achieve overarching policy objectives.