Over the past twenty years community-based forestry management (CBFM) has become a well-established practice in Ghana. The move away from state-based centralized forestry management follows wider trends within West Africa and the rest of the world to politically and economically liberalize forestry management to include lower-level actors (e.g. communities, individuals, businesses, NGOs, local governments, etc...). Proponents of CBFM argue that policies and programs that incorporate community-based participation and decision making within forestry management helps to foster equitable and sustainable forestry management. Critics, however, argue that CBFM leads to inequitable and unsustainable results due to the unsophisticated creation and implementation of CBFM policies and projects, the reluctance of states to cede control over management, and the power of elites to capture resources (e.g. land, labor, forest-related products). This dissertation contributes to the literature on CBFM by investigating a new and innovative program aimed at positioning farmers as the primary beneficiaries of plantation-based timber production within degraded portions of Ghana’s forest reserves. Based on ten months of research in and around Ghana’s Jimira Forest Reserve I argue that the transition away from centralized forestry management can produce an enabling space to foster equitable and sustainable forestry management. This opportunity, however, becomes significantly constrained when community-based programs get coopted by business-based programs that supposedly achieve the same goals.
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