Ghana’s landscape approach to REDD+: Is it decentralizing or recentralizing power?

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Geoforum (2025)

Highlights

Landscape approaches promise improved inclusion of neglected actors in land governance.
We explore power devolution in the world’s first emissions reduction program via a landscape approach to sustainable cocoa.
Devolved powers were limited to internal functions of federal bodies in the approach.
International carbon finance priorities may entrench existing power inequities in the landscape approach.
Cross-institutional reforms are crucial for communities to reclaim land and forest rights.

Ghana’s Landscape Approach to REDD+: Is it decentralizing or recentralizing power?

Since 1889, local communities in Ghana have been struggling to achieve equitable control over their land and forest resources

Ghana parade

Society

Encompassing the governance and socio-cultural dimensions of nature recovery.

Understanding nature recovery paths and ecosystem functioning through forests health assessments

Quantifying the health of forests ecosystems by means of earth observation can aid in understanding nature recovery paths and ecosystem functioning

Some cocoa pods

Institutional innovations for nature recovery

A power-sensitive and multi-level analysis of institutions involved in pursuing landscape scale nature recovery and their intersection with questions of equity and justice in the UK and Ghana.