Power, Participation, and Decision-Making in Community-Based Ecotourism Projects in Ghana

Community-based ecotourism is widely promoted as a strategy for combining biodiversity conservation with rural development, yet its transformative potential depends on how authority, information, resources, and benefits are distributed among stakeholders. This paper compares governance, participation, and benefit-sharing across Kakum National Park, the Boabeng-Fiema Monkey Sanctuary, the Wechiau Hippo Sanctuary, and Mole National Park. It uses a structured evidence synthesis of the reported 327 peer-reviewed publications on Ghanaian ecotourism from 2000 to 2025, supplemented by policy and management documents and site-specific empirical studies. Lukes’ three-dimensional conception of power and Arnstein’s participation ladder provide the principal theoretical lenses. Six analytical lenses—decision-making, agenda setting, resource control, discourse, networks, and outcomes—were applied to site evidence, while seven observable forms of power were coded as coercive, economic, expert, legitimate, informational, network, and discursive power. The revised analysis finds that formal participation frequently coexists with concentrated substantive authority. It also shows why headline revenue-sharing percentages should not be interpreted as direct measures of equity without examining control over collection, allocation, disclosure, timing, and accountability. Importantly, Boabeng-Fiema is no longer classified as community-wide delegated power or citizen control: its relatively strong local control is more accurately characterized as customary/traditional authority with substantial local autonomy but internal concentration of decision-making. The paper distinguishes binding legal provisions from reported practice and avoids treating unverified site-level numerical estimates as harmonized statistics.