Ghana : Indicators

There is an emerging national forest forum comprising representation of members from various forums at the district level. It is not yet very national in character especially because only 35 out of 170 Administrative Districts have forest forums and also because the processes for representation require streamlining. As it stands now, it is more of a top down approach.
The government together with development partners have established an annual Environment and Natural Resources Sector Summit where the performance of the forest, mining and environment sector is reviewed. This has evolved as part of the Natural Resource and Environmental Governance (NREG) sector budget support. The third meeting was held in August 2010 and saw improved civil society participation (from 2 in 2008, 5 in 2009 and 10 in 2010) in the summit.
More significantly, civil society in March 2010 organised its own parallel review of the environment and natural resource sector as part of an on-going civil society support facility called KASA. The results of the review were presented to government at the summit as civil society input. Even though the KASA project has officially ended, other initiatives like STAR-GHANA (Strengthening Transparency, Accountability And Responsiveness In Ghana) will provide support to CSOs and this may provide avenues for reviewing the environment and natural resources sector regularly. It is noted though that all these have no legally binding mechanisms.