Community conservation in Ghana has evolved, but policy and funding need to catch up

In Ghana, community resource management areas are the main way that local communities get involved in managing natural resources that fall outside protected areas. In this way, rural people protect their natural environment and earn a living from using nature sustainably.

The community resource management areas adopt a very different approach from fortress conservation. This is known to exclude and evict local communities from their lands.

Since the early 2000s, more than 63 community resource management areas have been set up across over 600 communities. They cover roughly 2 million hectares, just under 10% of Ghana's total land area.

The right to land and natural resources is complicated in Ghana. In many parts of the country, communities, traditional leaders, private companies and the government may all claim rights over the same land or natural resources. This leads to disagreements over who can use land, trees and wildlife.

We are conservation scientists specialising in community-based natural resource management, rural development and climate change. We did our PhD research on how these areas are managed. We also looked into how community resource management areas affect local incomes, jobs and people's daily lives, and how they could be funded with green financing.

In our view, community resource management areas are important because they help land to be managed by those closest to it. They also tackle climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and support people's livelihoods.

For example:

• they restore landscapes. They provide training and funding for communities to protect forests, prevent bushfires and undertake tree planting and better land use practices.

• they're important for health. The people living in these areas spend more time in nature. Our research showed they often felt less stressed, slept better, and coped better with daily challenges.

• they are essential for delivering climate, conservation and development programmes at scale. For example, the Ghana Shea Landscape Emission Reductions Project in northern Ghana supports communities to protect and restore shea parklands. This reduces deforestation and generates income.

The Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Programme in southern Ghana also relies on the community resource management area to bring communities, government agencies and farmers together to manage forests and carry out conservation activities.

Together, these two initiatives have established or supported 37 community resource management areas nationwide. Crucially, these initiatives focus on improved management of land and trees, not wildlife conservation alone.

Progress and pitfalls

However, community resource management areas have produced mixed outcomes. On the one hand, they've been successful in conservation and helping people's livelihoods. For instance, the community resource management area in Wechiau, in Ghana's Upper West Region along the border of Burkina Faso, includes a stretch of the Black Volta River where some of the last remaining hippopotamus live.

This area has helped increase the hippopotamus population by protecting river habitats, limiting hunting and involving local communities in ecotourism and conservation activities.

The Zukpiri community resource management area is another good example. It was set up by a local traditional healers' association, mainly to conserve and improve their traditional medicine sources. It covers an area of 420km² and includes 16 communities. Since its establishment in the early 1990s, the forest has expanded because the communities protect it from uncontrolled cutting and bushfires. They also continue to plant trees to cover more areas.

However, there are negative aspects to the community resource management areas. Certain groups like women and Fulani herders are excluded from decision making. In some of the areas, local leaders, community elites and non-governmental organisations control decisions and benefits for their own interests, such as undertaking illegal land sales within the community resource management area to their relatives and friends.

In some cases, communities have disagreed over who owns the land, who can farm or harvest resources there, and who should benefit from conservation projects.

Part of the problem is that government programmes for farming, forestry and conservation often operate separately instead of supporting each other. This leads to conflicting rules and policies, making it harder for communities to manage land effectively.

Many areas do not receive enough long-term funding and lack equipment and technical support, which means they are not sustainable.

How the law falls short

Ghana's government has taken steps to provide legal backing for these areas. A long-awaited reform, the Wildlife Resources Management Act, was signed into law in 2024. It's the first national policy instrument to recognise community resource management areas and to outline how they should be established and governed.

More recently, the government has begun consulting key people and organisations involved in these areas, such as local government authorities, traditional leaders and NGOs, on how to put the law into practice.

But in our view, the law has limited potential to support community resource management areas. It only recognises these areas as ways of protecting wildlife. The law doesn't give legal backing to using other natural resources in the areas (such as trees and land) despite farming and forest activities being the main source of livelihood in these areas. If community resource management areas are to succeed, Ghana's policy framework must address these gaps:

First, communities should have clearer legal rights to manage and benefit from trees on their land, instead of control remaining mostly with the state or private interests.

Second, many community resource management areas focus on farming and forest related activities. Government agencies responsible for these activities need to work more closely together. In this way, communities will receive clear and consistent support. Ghana's national, district and community level governments should have the same approach to the areas.

Third, community resource management areas need reliable long-term funding so communities can organise meetings, support local livelihoods, monitor conservation activities and share benefits fairly.

Finally, funding decisions should be open and transparent, and communities should fully understand and agree to projects affecting their land and resources before they begin.

Addressing these gaps would produce a more realistic and effective legal framework, one that reflects how community research management areas actually operate and supports their long-term success.

Samuel Adeyanju received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada as a Vanier Scholar, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and CIFOR-ICRAF's COLANDS initiative.

Alida O'Connor's doctoral research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and CIFOR-ICRAF's COLANDS initiative.

Cornelius K. A. Pienaah's research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) – Canada Graduate Research Scholarship Doctoral (CGRS D) Program; the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS); the Faculty of Social Science Graduate Research Awards Fund (GRAF); and the Michael Troughton Bursary Award.

By Samuel Adeyanju, PhD Student, University of British Columbia And

Alida O'Connor, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences, University of British Columbia And

Cornelius K. A. Pienaah, PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography and Environment, Western University

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