Customary Authorities and Environmental Governance in Africa: A Systematic Review

Figures & data

Figure 1. PRISMA flow diagram for search on customary authorities in sustainable environmental governance (based on Moher et al., 2009).

Table 1. The four main roles of customary authorities in sustainability governance as derived from a systematic review of the 68 included papers.

Role	Description	Example
Enforcing	Supervising and regulating communities’ compliance with existing formal/informal rule frameworks	Enforcing hunting bans in conservation areas (Adom and Boamah 2020)
Managing	Creating rule frameworks with some level of decision-making power	Regulating access to trees (Majambu et al. 2019)
Rent-seeking	Using governance framework for private gain/interest	Corruption, circumvention of state institutions to sell land for private gain (Ahmed et al. 2019)
Supportive	Supporting, amplifying other stakeholders	Conflict mediation, representation, education (Ngaruiya and Scheffran 2016)

Figure 2. Map of locations of the customary authorities in the included papers, showing the dominance of Ghana; numbers of cases listed by environmental domain, with forestry and biodiversity/conservation as most common.

Figure 3. Mapping of the different stakeholders interacting with customary authorities in environmental governance and their relationships.

Table 2. Numbers of cases with different roles of customary authorities in environmental governance, including combinations, as derived from a systematic review of the 68 included papers.

Role	Number of Cases
Managing	7
Enforcing	4
Supporting	5
Managing + Enforcing	8
Managing + Supporting	13
Managing + Enforcing + Supporting	2
Enforcing + Supporting	3
Rent-seeking + Managing	13
Rent-seeking + Enforcing	3
Rent-seeking + Supporting	2
Rent-seeking + Managing + Supporting	2
Rent-seeking + Managing + Enforcing	3
NA	4
Total	69

Figure 4. (A) The impact of customary authorities on sustainability by environmental domain; (B) The impact of customary authorities on sustainability by governance role.

Moher, D., A. Liberati, J. Tetzlaff, and D. G. Altman. 2009. Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: The PRISMA statement. Annals of Internal Medicine 151 (4):264–9, W64. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-151-4-200908180-00135.

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Adom, D., and D. A. Boamah. 2020. Local attitudes toward the cultural seasonal hunting bans in Ghana’s Bomfobiri Wildlife Sanctuary: Implications for sustainable wildlife management and tourism. Global Ecology and Conservation 24:e01243. doi:10.1016/j.gecco.2020.e01243.

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Majambu, E., S. M. Wabasa, C. W. Elatre, L. Boutinot, and S. Ongolo. 2019. Can traditional authority improve the governance of forestland and sustainability? Case study from the Congo (DRC). Land 8 (5):74. Article 5. doi:10.3390/land8050074.

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Ahmed, A., Z. Abubakari, and A. Gasparatos. 2019. Labelling large-scale land acquisitions as land grabs: Procedural and distributional considerations from two cases in Ghana. Geoforum 105:191–205. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.05.022.

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Ngaruiya, G. W., & Scheffran, J. 2016. Actors and networks in resource conflict resolution under climate change in rural Kenya. Earth System Dynamics, 7(2), 441–452

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