International Journal of Innovative Research and Development

Nkpeebo Yesutanbul Amos ¹, Opoku Mensah Seth ²

Affiliations
1 EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT)/Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) Project, Enforcement and Governance for Sustainable Forest Management Project, Friends of the Earth Ghana, PMB, GPO, Accra, GH
2 Department of Public Policy and Management, Korean Development Institute (KDI), School of Public Policy and Management, Seoul, South Korea, KP

Abstract

One action agreed on by parties in Ghana’s Voluntary Partnership Agreements is the restructuring of Ghana’s domestic timber market. With respect to restructuring the domestic timber market, a public procurement policy comes in as a handy apparatus for setting the pace of legality in the domestic timber market and by extension, the entire Ghanaian forestry sector. The impact of the timber procurement policy on forest management will largely depend on the leverage effect or the extent to which the private sector respond to the policy. And yet, public procurement is only a complementary instrument rather than a fundamental measure to change behavior of actors. In view of the numerous stakeholders involved in the domestic timber market, their different interests need to be addressed in order to ensure that the policy contributes adequately to the on-going timber market and legal reform process. Inspite of progress made on the policy, there is still an on-going debate on how to leverage the effects of the public procurement policy in the context of intractable stakeholder interest. In this regard, the information gaps are still wide. Interpretation tend to be selectively.

Keywords

Domestic Timber Market, Illegal Logging, Forest Management, Public Procurement Policy, Stakeholders.

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