Evaluating perceived process performance and outputs in designing a national collaborative REDD+ governance program in Ghana

Integrated landscape approaches to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) aim to balance competing land uses and address deforestation drivers outside the forest sector. Despite their conceptual appeal, implementation remains challenging due to the need for multi-level stakeholder alignment and cross-sectoral coordination. Collaborative governance regimes offer a promising mechanism to navigate these dilemmas; however, empirical evidence of their performance within Global South REDD+ contexts remain scarce. This study applies the Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance (IFCG) to analyze the links between collaborative dynamics, perceived process performance, and policy outputs during the formulation of the Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Program (GCFRP) from 2008 to 2019. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and comprehensive policy document analysis. The findings demonstrate that while the collaborative process successfully fostered joint deliberation, capacity building, and shared landscape visioning, the final program approved in 2019 failed to deliver significant reforms regarding deep-rooted issues like land tenure, tree/carbon rights, and localized benefit-sharing. Perceived process successes were driven by skilled neutral facilitation, cross-sector leadership, and international climate finance cross-sector requirements, yet local community priorities were largely sidelined in the final outputs. These results imply that while collaborative governance can significantly enhance the technical design of subnational REDD+ policies, neglecting underlying power imbalances and community-level tenure rights produces outputs lacking local legitimacy. Ultimately, this structural misalignment threatens to trigger localized resistance during the subsequent implementation phases of outputs.