Sara Berry
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780226322667
- eISBN:
- 9780226024134
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226024134.003.0025
- Subject:
- Biology, Biodiversity / Conservation Biology
This chapter presents a case study in Asante exploring the tension over land and the place of “traditional authority” in contemporary social life and land use, as well as the shifting power dynamic ...
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This chapter presents a case study in Asante exploring the tension over land and the place of “traditional authority” in contemporary social life and land use, as well as the shifting power dynamic between centralizing states and decentralized chiefly power. Reinforced during the colonial era and partially dismantled as part of an attempt by Ghana's first president to undo the colonial legacy, chiefly influence has re-emerged more recently when debates over the status and future of Asante's shrinking forests intersected with the neoliberal agenda. Plans for sustainable development, including forest recovery, often rest on imaginaries of bygone forests and implicit ideas about the relevance of knowledge about the past for present and future practice. Over the course of the 20th century, the social life of Asante forests reflected not only the power of market forces to remake natural environments, but also the ways in which market transactions, political contests and bureaucratic practices intersect with historical imagination. By raising the stakes in making claims of “original ownership,” recent efforts to rehabilitate Ghana's forests by privatizing them run the risk of increasing opportunities for rent-seeking and social exclusion, at the expense of equitable access and sustainable management.Less
This chapter presents a case study in Asante exploring the tension over land and the place of “traditional authority” in contemporary social life and land use, as well as the shifting power dynamic between centralizing states and decentralized chiefly power. Reinforced during the colonial era and partially dismantled as part of an attempt by Ghana's first president to undo the colonial legacy, chiefly influence has re-emerged more recently when debates over the status and future of Asante's shrinking forests intersected with the neoliberal agenda. Plans for sustainable development, including forest recovery, often rest on imaginaries of bygone forests and implicit ideas about the relevance of knowledge about the past for present and future practice. Over the course of the 20th century, the social life of Asante forests reflected not only the power of market forces to remake natural environments, but also the ways in which market transactions, political contests and bureaucratic practices intersect with historical imagination. By raising the stakes in making claims of “original ownership,” recent efforts to rehabilitate Ghana's forests by privatizing them run the risk of increasing opportunities for rent-seeking and social exclusion, at the expense of equitable access and sustainable management.
