Decentralization for Increased Sustainability in Natural Resource Management? Two Cautionary Cases from Ghana

Abstract

In Sub-Saharan African countries, governments are increasingly devolving natural resource management from central administration to the local government level as a trend toward subsidiarity. In parallel, efforts to implement formalization processes have resulted in a puzzling institutional arena, wherein mixed actors are struggling to influence the paths of institutional change and the associated distribution of land and land-related resources. Relying on political ecology and new institutionalism in social anthropology, we investigate how the decentralization of formalization of rights in artisanal and small-scale gold mining can lead to paradoxical outcomes, often negatively impacting social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Two comparative case studies are performed in Ghana. Our results show that the negative effects of formalization efforts for resource end users are to be understood in the broad context of actors’ repositioning strategies following the selective implementation of decentralization. The authors conclude that increasing the power of the central government and line ministries to control local resources can influence the disenfranchisement of local people’s participation and control of natural resources, resulting in a relentless environmental crisis.

The Politics of Decentralization: Competition in Land Administration and Management in Ghana

“…We relied on the mixed methods approach, including key informant interviews, semistructured interviews, biographic interviews, and focus group discussions (FGDs) to collect the relevant data for the study [10]. Eight key informant interviews were conducted with local government bureaucrats in land administration to share their knowledge, experiences and roles in land-use planning, plot demarcations and title processing.…”

“…Furthermore, 8 FGDs were conducted with a total of 72 selected small-scale farmers (both men and women) to triangulate the individual views expressed privately. We also augmented our empirical qualitative data with published journal articles on decentralization, participatory land-use planning, formalization programs and cadastral survey [7,10,16,17,40]. We reviewed legal documents, including the Acts of Parliament, relevant chapters of the 1992 Constitution, national land policy and unpublished documents from the land administration project.…”

“…The Bole case in the savannah region is characterized by a formal recognition of customary chiefs as sole authorities in the customary land secretariat to grant consent and concurrence in local land transaction [10,20,33,40]. Article 267 of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana acknowledges the de facto power of a customary chief to govern skin or stool lands in accordance with customary law.…”

“…The CLS is responsible for managing all land held under customary land tenure system [40]. The Talensi case in the upper east region is characterized by the absence of the customary land secretariat due to multiple customary authorities laying claim to the land [10,33]. In Talensi, the customary chiefs lay claim to the land based on the British colonial land legislations and the land administration project.…”

“…Decentralization in land administration and management is conceptually linked to participatory planning and is thus relevant for land-use planning and cadastral survey, which in turn influence land regularization and formalization [7]. Since the 1980s, the spread of formalization initiatives emerged in structural adjustment programs to promote individualized land ownership for increased land and natural resource sustainability [8][9][10][11][12]. In the realm of land tenure, formalization is defined as "the administrative recognition of occupancy rights-by the state or by local authorities-which results in the delivery of personal rights to household living in informal settlements [11,12] (p. 7).…”