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Paper short abstract:

I draw on fieldwork in northeastern Ghana to discuss how differentiated access to and control over ecological, political economic, and symbolic resources influences which social groups are most likely to benefit from a restoration intervention and which are more likely to bear costs and risks.

Paper long abstract:

As the UN Decade of Restoration nears, there has been strategic progress on the restoration agenda. This includes the Africa Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) in addition to earlier commitments such as the Bonn Challenge. 'Farmer-managed natural regeneration' (FMNR), an assisted natural regeneration approach to restoration, is increasingly seen as particularly suitable for restoring dryland ecosystems in Africa. However, to date most of the research on FMNR has remained technical in scope, with the few social science inquiries mainly based on the quantitative analysis of household survey data. This has resulted in a gap in the literature in terms of understanding how uneven resource distributions and asymmetries in power influence local adoption of FMNR. This gap in understanding also carries implications for equity and social inclusion in FMNR interventions. Considering how preexisting material and symbolic resource inequalities affects who 'wins' and who 'loses' in restoration lies at the heart of a political ecology analysis. I draw on fieldwork in northeastern Ghana to discuss how differentiated access to and control over ecological, political economic, and symbolic resources influences which social groups are most likely to benefit from FMNR and which are more likely to bear costs and risks.