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Incentives for bamboo plantations development in Ghana

University of British Columbia

The need to reverse or halt the loss of natural timber resources of Ghana is of great importance. Bamboo is a good alternative to timber and bamboo plantations can help reduce the pressure on natural forests. A number of initiatives and academic works have been conducted to encourage the domestic and commercial use of bamboo in Ghana. This thesis sought to add to these by exploring appropriate incentives for the development of bamboo plantations and proposing arrangements for the design of a bamboo incentive scheme. I covered three major areas in order to achieve these objectives: desired incentives for the development of bamboo plantations, possible effects of desired incentives on bamboo plantations and potential challenges to the adoption of incentives for bamboo plantation development. Large-scale and small-scale plantations developers in the Ashanti and Brong-Ahafo regions were interviewed with structured questionnaires. Purposive sampling was used and a total of 41 responses were gathered. I found profitability of bamboo and high demand for bamboo to be the top two desired incentives by the large-scale developers. Direct financial support and capacity building were the top two desired incentives for the Ashanti region small-scale developers while direct financial support and financial benefits from bamboo emerged as the top two desired incentives for the Brong-Ahafo small-scale developers. I also found that the use of incentives for the development of bamboo plantations would have favorable outcomes in Ghana. The lack of legal backing and favorable state policies and a lack of transparency in incentive acquisition processes emerged among the major potential challenges to the use of incentives for bamboo plantation development under both the large-scale and small-scale categories. I recommend that further studies should be conducted on a larger sample size to enable more reliable outcomes and conclusions to be drawn.

Text

2018-04-18

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/65484

Forestry

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/