European Union Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreement in Ghana: Introducing needed change or reinforcing business as usual?

While we agree that the VPA has helped establish new fora for dialogue in the forest sector in Ghana, we argue that it has not to date fundamentally changed the forest governance regime. Specifically, the VPA implementation has not changed tree tenure and benefit sharing practices, and by extension, the forestry concession system that for over eight decades has failed to secure forest sustainability and social equity. Our evidence contradicts depictions of Ghana’s VPA experience as wholly positive and entailing substantive dialogue, recursive problem solving, and policy learning. Rather, and paradoxically, we argue that the VPA implementation in Ghana is serving to stabilize and reproduce the very forest governance regime that it set out to reform – a process that is much less innovative and much more business as usual.