Governing Access to Forests in Northern Ghana: Micro-Politics and the Rents of Non-Enforcement

SummaryDecentralization of natural resource management is often presented as a novelty. However, successive attempts to decentralize authority were undertaken during the development of forest policy in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast Colony between the 1930s and 1950s. From 1960, however, this was rolled back. Forest policy was thenceforth characterized by centralization, exclusion, and restrictive legislation. New forest policies of local management from the 1990s attempt to change this but differ from “colonial decentralization” in terms of institutional fragmentation and the absence of effective fiscal decentralization. The assumed illegality of people’s use of the resources and the non-enforcement of the law provides a context for monetary and political rent seeking for political agents.