Abstract
Natural resource management literature has documented three paradigm shifts over the past decade: from co-management to adaptive co-management and adaptive governance respectively and, more recently, towards landscape governance. The latter is conceived as a governance approach towards negotiated land use at the landscape level to deal with global challenges such as food insecurity, climate change and biodiversity loss. There is not a lot of clarity about how co-management systems could actually evolve into landscape governance. This paper aims to address the gap by exploring how a stalled co-management system for the reforestation of degraded forest areas—the modified taungya system (MTS) in Ghana—could be revitalised and redesigned as a landscape approach. Drawing on case studies and expert consultation, the performance of the national MTS and the MTS under the Community Forestry Management Project is reviewed with regard to five principles (integrated approach, multi-stakeholder negotiation, polycentric governance, continual learning and adaptive capacity) and three enabling conditions (social capital, bridging organisations and long-term funding) distilled from the literature. The authors conclude that some of these principles and conditions were met under the Community Forestry Management Project, but that continual learning, transcending jurisdictional boundaries, developing adaptive capacity, and long-term funding and benefits still pose challenges.
Highlights
Literature on co-management—defined as the sharing between the state and user groups of responsibilities and decision-making power over certain resources in a particular area [1]—has exhibited two paradigm shifts over the past decade
Based on lessons learned from earlier research on the modified taungya system (MTS) and a literature review of trends in natural resource governance, this paper addresses the question: whither the MTS? Is it time for a phase that follows the paradigm shifts in natural resource governance? And if so, what should it look like and how can this transformation into adaptive and multilevel landscape governance best be achieved?
Based on the authors’ cumulative insights gained from previous research on the scheme [27,28,29,30] we review the performance of the MTS in relation to five principles and three conditions for adaptive landscape governance drawn from landscape [15] and adaptive co-management literature [4,12,22,23,24]
Summary
Literature on co-management—defined as the sharing between the state and user groups of responsibilities and decision-making power over certain resources in a particular area [1]—has exhibited two paradigm shifts over the past decade. Parallel and related (but not limited) to forest resources, a third paradigm shift can be observed towards landscape governance [14,15,16]. The latter is a multi-sector, multi-actor and multi-level governance approach [16] towards negotiated land use at the landscape level that inherently integrates the principles of adaptive and multi-level governance to deal with global challenges such as food insecurity, climate change and biodiversity loss [15,17]. Integrated landscape approaches have a longer history, e.g., as integrated watershed management programmes since the mid-20th century, landscape governance is still largely experimental [16]
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