Perpetuating the malign legacy of colonialism? Traditional chiefs’ power and deforestation in Sierra Leone

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Sierra Leone is affected by considerable deforestation. The chieftaincy as it exists today in Sierra Leone is a construct of colonialism with removed key aspects of bottom-up accountability that perpetuated itself after independence. In this setting, traditional chiefs have considerable power to shape multiple facets of everyday life in their local communities including land allocation that influences deforestation. There is an open question of whether keeping traditional chiefs as a construct from the colonial era perpetuates the malign legacy of colonialism. I explore from this perspective the role of traditional chiefs in deforestation in Sierra Leone. By combining high-resolution satellite image data with survey and historic data in a regression analysis setting, the central findings of this article are that keeping the institution of traditional chiefs in its state from colonial times, giving them power to define multiple aspects of everyday life at the local level, combined with chiefs’ and the broader state’s corruption accelerates deforestation. These results have important implications for the increasingly popular global trend toward forestry decentralization strategies. The article suggests that a reform of the traditional chiefs’ system in Sierra Leone and in countries with a similar structure of local traditional authorities is needed and that democratic decentralization of forest management with bottom-up accountability of traditional chiefs may be a viable solution.