The multiple streams framework and forest policy change process in Ghana

Abstract One important policy that has witnessed both change and stability is Ghana’s 1948 Forest Policy. The Policy’s implementation period has been the longest, spanning from the colonial era in 1948 to the post-colonial period of 1994. It also expanded government control over off-reserve forests and encouraged the persistent exploitation of the resource to generate foreign exchange. It is against this backdrop that this study adopts the multiple streams framework (MSF) as an analytical perspective to address the question of why and how Ghana’s forest and wildlife policy changed in 1994. Dwelling on both primary and secondary data, the study found that the Ghanaian case confirms the MSF assumption that the coupling of the streams of problem, policy, and politics via a policy window by policy entrepreneurs (PEs) will result in policy change. However, in an instance where PEs are unable to provide technically and politically feasible alternatives, the existing policy will remain unchanged. The study recommends that PEs should be tactful and sensitive to their environment to achieve success.


PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT
In most developing countries, the process of policymaking is hugely dominated by the state. The dominance of the state is not bad in itself because state institutions are usually the most resourced in terms of personnel, finance, and logistics. It is therefore not out of place for the state to take leadership roles in policy formation. However, these leadership roles are often abused leading to the exclusion of the direct recipients of the policies adopted as revealed in the Ghanaian forest policy change process. This does not inure to the benefits of the collective and often results in implementation difficulties. Therefore the ritual of changing policies to improve upon implementation becomes a myth rather than a reality. This study recommends that to ensure success, there is a need to widen the participation net to include those at the receiving end of the policy.

Introduction
Ghana's formal forest and wildlife conservation efforts could be traced to the beginning of the 20 th century when it was reported that the increasing population with its accompanied high demand for forest resources and agricultural land led to a rapid rate of deforestation (Attuquayefio & Fobil, 2005). More importantly, the year 1906 saw the passage of legislation to restrain the cutting down of salable timber species after which a Forestry Department was established in 1909. Within that same period, colonial administrators were motivated by the 1900 London Convention 1 to also ensure the sustainable exploitation and management of game. This began the preparation to set up the first game reserve after the Department of Game and Wildlife was established from the Game Unit of the Forestry Department (Attuquayefio & Fobil, 2005). The above events then opened the floodgates for the proliferation of policies and laws in the forest and wildlife sector of Ghana.
It must be emphasized that, although formal forest governance was initiated by the British Colonial Administration (Foggie, 1962;Logan, 1946;Smith, 1996), the indigenous Ghanaian people at the time were managing forest resources long before the arrival of colonialism. These prior colonial conservation efforts were mostly determined by ecological matters and spiritual intentions. They were unrecorded by-laws (FAO, 1985;Foggie, 1962;Kotey et al., 1998), and communities had their own unique ways of implementing them. These unrecorded by-laws seemed inadequate as they could not conserve very extensive areas. The Forest Act 1927 (CAP 157) was then introduced to provide conditions and procedures to set up forest reserves, and then make clear the ownership of land within a forest reserve. This also came with its own challenges, as the focus was only on establishing forest reserves. In view of this, the 1948 Forest Policy came as a substitute becoming the foremost wide-ranging policy to direct flora management in Ghana (Teye, 2008). It is observed that the 1948 Policy was mainly purposed to control and supervise the judicious trade of manufactured logs (Ghana Forest Watch (GFW), 2006). This became necessary because of the rapid pace of flora and fauna exploitation in both protected and non-protected areas. Since the 1948 Forest Policy, there have been two other policies consisting of the 1994 and 2012 Forest and Wildlife Policies (FWP). The objective of the changes has been that the latter policy should improve upon what the former sought to do with regard to reducing the rapid rate of forest and wildlife depletion.
However, this is far from reality as it is observed that there is an annual forest depletion rate of about 70,000 ha, which is converted into other land use forms, particularly, farming, mining, infrastructural development, among others (F. K. Anebo, 2012;Environmental News Agency, 2017;Government of Ghana, 2014;Asante, 2020). This puts excessive pressure on the habitats of flora and fauna species also leading to their gradual extinction. Ghana presents a very unique context, with a history of alternating both military and constitutional rules prior to the inception of the current 1992 Constitution. This Constitution encourages multiparty competition as a means of changing power and provides the enabling environment for the participation of nonstate actors in policy making. 2 Furthermore, it is important to point out that, every policy change phenomenon comes with very unique and peculiar dynamics, and as such has to be extensively researched so that lessons drawn are not missed but conspicuously highlighted to add to the existing body of knowledge of policy research. It is based on this assumption that this study looks at the maiden policy change in Ghana's forest and wildlife sector through the lens of the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF). Specific questions that direct the study include first, why did Ghana's forest and wildlife policy change in 1994? And then second, how did Ghana's forest and wildlife policy change in 1994? This study is not oblivious of the fact that earlier scholarly works have favored a multi-lens theoretical approach to explain policy change (Cairney, 2013;Cairney & Weible, 2017;Heikkila et al., 2014;Howlett et al., 2015Howlett et al., , 2016John, 2003;Koebele, 2019;Meijerink, 2005), however, it is worth highlighting that every theory seeks to uniquely explain policy change within a given policy domain or space, thereby making the single-lens theoretical approach to explaining policy change still relevant deserving the necessary attention and prominence in the extant literature (Ainuson, 2009;Marfo & Mckeown, 2013;Michaud, 2019;Nohrstedt & Olofsson, 2016;Villamor, 2006;Steinberg, 2003). This study contributes in that regard by drawing on the MSF perspective to explain and deepen understanding of the maiden Ghana's forest and wildlife policy change. The study is therefore organized in the following order-introduction, theoretical framework, methodology, presentation of findings, discussion of findings, and conclusion with policy implications.

Theoretical framework-the multiple streams
John Kingdon is said to have propounded the MSF in his erudite work published in 1984 titled -"Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policies". It is acknowledged that he was inspired by Cohen, March and Olsen's (1972) "garbage can" model of organizational behavior. The MSF posits that policies are made by governments under conditions of ambiguity (the availability of potential options around a policy issue). Further, the MSF argues that a policy is likely to change when the relatively independent streams of problem, policy, and politics are coupled by a policy entrepreneur through a window of opportunity (Herweg et al., 2017;J. Kingdon, 1984;Zahariadis, 2007). MSF explains that the problem stream is the challenge at hand that needs to be addressed. The policy stream is the solution expected to help address the problem at hand, and the politics stream is the political support for the policy. Under the politics stream, the following components are of key significance thus, the national mood, pressure group campaigns, and administrative or legislative turnover.
Other relevant components of the MSF include the policy entrepreneur and the policy window. Policy entrepreneurs are individuals and organizations with the resources to engage in policy activity and seek future rewards. Some researchers have attempted to expand the discussion on policy entrepreneurs by roping in political entrepreneurs (elected or appointed) and institutional entrepreneurs (bureaucrats) (Bakir et al., 2021;Cairney, 2018;Shephard et al., 2021). On the other hand, policy windows are seen as critical moments usually fleeting occasions that policy entrepreneurs can take advantage of to push their policy proposals or ideas to capture the interests of policymakers (J. Kingdon, 1984). To distinguish opportunities to get an issue on the agenda from opportunities to get policies adopted, Herweg et al. (2015) have suggested calling the former "agenda windows" and the latter "decision windows". This paper recognizes both but keeps the term policy windows consistent with the original construct of the MSF (Herweg et al., 2017;J. Kingdon, 1984).
The MSF has undergone some evolution over the years beginning from J. Kingdon's (1984) one locational focus (USA), time (post-war period to the 1980s), and few policy domains (health and transport) to many places, periods, and policy areas (Brunner, 2008;Kagan, 2018;Tanaka et al., 2020). MSF-inspired studies have shown that the concepts and metaphor are flexible enough to be applied to almost any place, time, or policy, including but not limited to alternative energy development policy (Kagan, 2018), power sector development policy (Tanaka et al., 2020), logging policy (Sotoudeh Foumani et al., 2021), conservation policy (Dunning, 2021) and forest and wildlife policy (Asante, 2022). The MSF has mostly been applied to the policy stages of agenda-setting and decision-making, and on rare occasions applied to policy implementation and termination (Herweg et al., 2015(Herweg et al., , 2017. However, this paper applies MSF to decision-making rather than agenda-setting. The difference between decision-making and agenda-setting is that the latter is a process with a large number of actors competing for attention on various proposals, whereas the former is about obtaining a majority for a proposal. The number of actors decreases during decision-making, and the relevance of institutions increases (Herweg et al., 2017;Knill & Tosun, 2020). Another important area of MSF's improvement is in the area of propositions or possible expectations (Herweg et al., 2015;Zahariadis, 2014). This paper aligns with two of these propositions on decision making thus, policy adoption is more likely if the proposal is put forward by a government or majority party that is not constrained by other veto actors, and then policy adoption is more likely if the problem that the policy is supposed to solve is salient among the voters (Herweg et al., 2017).
Additionally, Proponents of the MSF posit that a decision window opens once agenda coupling succeeds. The result of successful decision coupling is the adoption of a bill. The main question during decision coupling is how to build the necessary majorities to adopt a proposal that has already been coupled to a specific problem during agenda setting (Herweg et al., 2015(Herweg et al., , 2017. Political entrepreneurs i.e. those who hold an elected leadership position and who actively support a proposal are the key actors in this process. They try to obtain majority support for their projects and bargain over the specific details of the policy. The chances of a political entrepreneur getting a pet proposal adopted once it is on the agenda increases if the entrepreneur is a cabinet member in a Westminster kind of political system. Thus, in systems with few or no veto actors, decision coupling will be smoother in most instances because the adoption of a policy that is supported by the responsible minister is almost certain (Herweg et al., 2017). This is where this paper contributes to theory in that Ghana runs a quasi-presidential political system-the cabinet minister who is part of the executive leads the policy change process, and so the adoption of the policy proposal is without constraints. All that cabinet does after the government's approval to proceed with the change process, is to review the document and suggest areas of refinements, and the deal is sealed. The policy proposal is accepted if the areas pointed out to be refined by the cabinet are done ( Figure 1 summarizes the MSF).

Methodology
This study adopts the qualitative case study approach which encourages the examination of the forest and wildlife policy change process in its real-life context (Yin, 1989), and the adoption of different methods of data collection (Creswell, 2007). The debates among scholars on the concept of policy change and the many actors in the policy process alongside their interests and preferences make the qualitative methodology very appropriate for this study. The population of this study consists of all stakeholders in Ghana's FWP subsystem. The purposive sampling technique was adopted for the in-depth interviews and involves choosing a sample based on the knowledge of participants on the subject (Babbie, 2008;Palys, 2012). The sample size for the study consisted of 16 participants (see Table 1). It is observed that some sampled categories have more participants than others because of their relevance and direct role in the policy domain and the change process.
Furthermore, the specific method for data collection employed in this study included in-depth personal interviews which usually proceeded as a conversation between the researcher and participants based on semi-structured interview questions (McNabb, 2013). Ethical considerations

Open Policy Windows
Paradigm shift in political governance in 1992, the 1992 Earth Summit, the 1972 Stockholm Conference.

Problem Stream
Excessive exploitation of forest and wildlife species leading to the extinction of some of them.

Policy Stream
The judicious utilization and safeguarding of Ghana's forest and wildlife resources pushed by policy (institutional) entrepreneurs.

Politics Stream
Policy makers' support, pressure group campaigns, changes in public opinion, etc., favored policy change in Ghana.

Policy Change
1948 Forest Policy changed to 1994 Forest and Wildlife Policy. such as informed consent, anonymity of interviewees, and protection from any form of harm were strictly adhered to. Permission was sought and granted by the researcher's ethical committee before the fieldwork was conducted. Secondary data emanated from online databases, internet materials, books, journal articles, and reports. The study acknowledges as a possibility that participants' memories may have been affected by the time lapse between the interviews (2018-2019) and the policy events (1990s), and that they may be providing views that were only developed later, or that they have forgotten what actually occurred. Data from other sources such as newspapers, official reports, and policy documents were used to triangulate interview data.
The Content analysis technique was used to analyze the data from both the primary and secondary sources. According to Hsieh and Shannon (2005), qualitative content analysis refers to the subjective interpretation of the content of text data through the logical ordering method of coding and identifying themes or patterns. Coding began using predetermined codes derived from the theory and objectives of the study. Coding was done manually by grouping similar ideas into themes (Benaquisto, 2012;Miles & Huberman, 1994). After this, the data were reorganized to consolidate meaning and develop explanations. This was where themes developed earlier had to be reorganized under the pre-determined codes like the politics stream, problem stream, policy entrepreneur, policy windows, among others.

Presentation of the study's findings
This section of the paper presents the key findings of the study. Relevant themes that are discussed here include problem stream, policy stream, politics stream, policy entrepreneurs, and policy window.

Problem stream
The rapid exploitation and extinction of very important plant and animal species like cedrela, afromorsia (pericopsis elata) (Appiah & Bediako, 2017), gacinia kola, and calamus; red colobus monkey, hunting dogs, giant forest hog, elephant, leopard, giant pangolin, African grey parrots, royal pythons, chameleons, among others (Asare & Asante, 2014; Government of Ghana, 2014) was a key challenge for Ghana. Just like the global realm where consistent efforts are being made to safeguard forest and wildlife resources through both bilateral and multilateral arrangements without much success, Ghana's situation presented a similar picture as the unrelenting fight against forest degradation and deforestation through the numerous laws and policy changes was not yielding the expected results (Government of Ghana, 2012Ghana, , 2014Overdevest & Zeitlin, 2018;McDermot, 2014;McConnell, 2010;Zittoun, 2015;May, 1992). This is captured in the following statements of some of the interviewees:

Policy stream
One of the crucial policy proposals pushed forward by policy actors during this period was a change in focus that sought to ensure the judicious utilization and safeguarding of Ghana's forest and wildlife resources. This policy proposal was expected to preserve the ecological value of the forest and ensure that benefits from the resource are equitably distributed to all aspects of society. Specific strategies to accomplish the above included but were not limited to first, increasing the development of essential and feasible timber-based industries, so that forest resources can be completely used and then be able to satisfy both domestic and foreign demands for valuable forest-based products; second, advance participation and consciousness of community dwellers in forest and wildlife protection in order to preserve life support systems, natural scenery areas, and improve possible tourism, recreation and businessoriented opportunities; and then finally, harness efficient competencies at all government levels for the wise use of flora and fauna reserves (Government of Ghana GoG, 1994). Additionally, the new policy attempted to tackle the issue of lack of stakeholder involvement in all aspects of the policy process, and recognizing these stakeholders as partners in the implementation process. Finally, there was a move for the new policy to moderately emphasize the consumptive benefits of forest resources (see Table 2).

Politics stream
Here, the elements of the national mood, legislative/administrative turnover, and pressure group campaigns played out in Ghana's case. For the legislative and administrative turnover, one key informant asserted that: The new crop of political elites that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s immensely shaped public opinion and drew attention to the seriousness of the depletion and degradation of forest resources. These political elites warned timber industries, the general populace, and all stakeholders about the need to preserve the forest for posterity whenever they had the opportunity to make any public pronouncements. (Divisional Director 3 of the FC, Personal Communication, 2 October 2018) Examples of the political elites that fall in the above category included but were not limited to Mr. Kwame Peprah, the then Secretary for Lands and Natural Resources (Van Ess, 1989), Mr. Yelibora Antunmini, Upper West Regional Secretary, and Col (rtd) E. M. Osei-Owusu, Ashanti Regional Secretary (Otchere, 1989). These political elites were willing and enthusiastic in supporting the environmental protection course. It, therefore, did not come as a surprise when the 1948 Forest Policy had to be comprehensively reviewed and changed to the 1994 FWP to reflect the elites' interests.
On national mood or domestic public opinion, both internal and external factors were key. For internal factors, issues of bushfires were rampant, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, illegal mining operations were on the ascendancy, and negative impact of slash-and-burn agriculture increased the general outcry for changes in the existing policy. In addition, government officials, chiefs, and clergymen added their voices to the forest and wildlife situation in the country and called for measures such as the promotion of public education and advocacy on forest laws, policies, and programmes; changes in unfriendly environmental behaviors such as praising hunters for killing large animal species, setting up bushfires to catch rats and agricultural purposes, poisoning streams for fishing, among others. The pronouncements and actions of these important men in society shaped domestic public opinion greatly (Dzamboe, 2012;Sam & Achiaw, 1992;Tamakloe & Pietrus, 2011).
Additionally, the external factors on the other hand focused on the need for Ghana to favorably respond to the numerous international environmental agreements it has signed for the sake of its global image and to continuously attract donor support. 3 An interviewee asserted that for Ghana to stay relevant, it is in her best interest not to stay isolated from the rest of the world, rather it should actively become environmentally conscious. This move was reflected in how the 1992 Earth Summit greatly influenced the formulation of the 1994 Forest and Wildlife Policy. 4 Not only this, Derkye (2007) reveals that an important role of foreign actors was seen through the World Bank's preparatory mission study for the Forest Resource Management Project (FRMP) that detected weaknesses of the 1948 Forest Policy in tackling the challenge of a deteriorating forest resource and therefore called for its change. The focus was on the forest only. Focused on forest and wildlife.
The unreserved forest was under continuous exploitation without replacement (no room for reforestation).
Encouraged sustainable management of unreserved forests.
Implementation of the policy was restrictive and characterized by command and control of the state.
Implementation was moderately participatory but still state-dominated.
Stakeholder participation was little entertained.
There was an improvement in stakeholder participation in all aspects of the policy process.
Solely favored consumptive benefits of forest resources.
Emphasized moderately consumptive benefits of forest resources.
Yearly allowable cut provision was not properly enforced leading to excessive depletion of timber resources.
Yearly allowable cut enforcement lapse detected and worked on.
Pressure group campaigns as reflected in the activities of Nongovernmental Environmental Organizations intensified prior to the 1994 Flora and Fauna Policy change. They embarked on educational campaigns particularly in the rural areas to create the necessary awareness of the need to halt the high rate of environmental degradation (Van Ess, 1992). It is observed that the activities of these pressure groups were not limited to the domestic scene alone, but the international realm as well as they became very vocal and put pressure on countries to commit themselves to reducing deforestation and forest degradation. 5 In the Ghanaian case for instance, a popular expose captioned "Plunder in Ghana's Rainforest for Illegal Profit" by Friends of the Earth in March 1992 revealed the plunder of Ghana's forest resources by some European and Asian firms with the collaboration of some Ghanaians to the detriment of the country. According to the report, under questionable circumstances, certain firms including Marktrace Projects UK Ltd., Richard Anders GmbH of Germany, Bekol BV of the Netherlands, and Crane Bouquet of UK signed various consultancy and joint venture agreements with the Lands and Natural Resources Ministry, the Timber Export Development Board, and other state agencies which enabled them to siphon huge sums of money from the country (Asare-Donkoh, 1992). This important revelation added momentum to the call for a change of the existing 1948 Forest policy.

Policy window
The opportunity to change the 1948 Policy started building up globally around the 1970s, when the increasing information on threatened forest and wildlife species, as well as other environmental concerns pushed for the preparation and the subsequent organization of the 1972 Stockholm Conference. The Stockholm Declaration which emanated from the 1972 Conference openly encouraged states to put in place suitable domestic establishments to effectively manage and deal with challenges related to the environment (Busch & Jörgens, 2005). Ghana took inspiration from this Conference and set up the Environmental Protection Council (EPC) which is currently known as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1974 to advise the government on environment-related issues. Following the above came the 1992 UN Conference held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on Environment and Development (UNCED). 6 Here, the call for "appropriate national institutions" for environmental protection as mentioned in the 1972 Conference was reinforced. There was a general call to action for states to suitably provide opportunities for their populations to access environment-related information and initiate nationwide environmental mechanisms to confront state-level environmental challenges (Busch & Jörgens, 2005). An important feature of the UNCED was the equal attention given to the environment and development. This was a departure from the 1972 Stockholm Conference which prioritized the environment.
It is observed that many African countries including Ghana made preparations to actualize the collective decisions from the above global meetings in their jurisdictions. It could be argued that after the 1948 Policy was comprehensively reviewed, the challenges confronting the forest and wildlife sector became very clear to the key actors. High rates of deforestation were ongoing, low community participation, encroachment, wildfires, and demand from chiefs to control the resources, among others. 7 This clearly suggested that there was a need to relook at the way things were done and to move with the global wind of change. This, however, led those actors who were in favor of excessive exploitation of timber resources to have their beliefs shaken.
Another important window of opportunity that led to the change in Ghana's FWP in 1994 was the paradigm shift in Ghana's politics. The early 1990s saw the Constitution as the bases for governance, a clear departure from the military era where military decrees and declarations governed politics. Article 36(9) of the 1992 Constitution provides that "the State shall take appropriate measures needed to protect and safeguard the national environment for posterity; and shall seek cooperation with other states and bodies for purposes of protecting the wider international environment for mankind". This was a great influence on the policy change witnessed in 1994, as some institutions were reformed as a result. A classic example was the Forestry Commission (FC) Act 1999 (Act 571) which reformed the FC to take charge of the execution of forest policies as well as the efficient use of forest resources in the country.

Policy entrepreneur(s)
Policy entrepreneurs consist of policy actors who try to unite the three streams of problem, policy, and politics together via a window of opportunity (J. Kingdon, 1984). Proponents of MSF hold the view that policy entrepreneurs must be determined and capable of attaching solutions to their corresponding problems and then identify and persuade politicians to buy into their ideas or solutions. In the Ghanaian case, the policy entrepreneur was the sector Ministry in charge of Lands and Forestry (MLF). A policy review team (PRT) was initially constituted by the MLF. This team spearheaded the policy change process beginning with persuading the government to buy into the idea of change. The change only proceeded after government approval, demonstrating the enormous powers of political leadership. 8

Discussion of the study's findings
The discussion here looks at the successful coupling of the streams of problem, policy, and politics by policy entrepreneurs to lead to policy change. To reiterate, proponents of the MSF suggest that policy entrepreneurs should be able to couple the three streams of problem, politics, and policy through a policy window for a policy to change (Herweg et al., 2017;J. Kingdon, 2014;Zahariadis, 2007). With this in the background, a number of challenges were identified in the forest sector consisting of a lack of coordination in implementing the policy, low participation levels of key stakeholders (chiefs, community dwellers, CSOs, etc.), many cases of encroachment by illegal chain-saw operators, the incidence of wildfires were increasing, overgrazing in the savannah landscapes spearheaded by the Fulani herdsmen, the neglect of international commitments, and the abounding incidence of illegal mining taking place in both the reserves and off-reserves. The above challenges were not adequately addressed by the 1948 Policy and so policy entrepreneurs (the Lands and Forestry Minister with his PRT), had to trigger the policy change process.
As mentioned earlier, this paper applies MSF to decision-making. It is believed that Ghana's forest policy had successfully been coupled at the agenda-setting stage and so it was left with how the policy proposal will be adopted. The main question during decision coupling is how to build the necessary majorities to adopt a proposal that has already been coupled to a specific problem during agenda setting (Herweg et al., 2015(Herweg et al., , 2017. Political entrepreneurs are important actors here, they try to obtain majority support for their projects and bargain over the specific details of the policy. The chances of a political entrepreneur getting a pet proposal adopted once it is on the agenda increases if the entrepreneur is a cabinet member in a Westminster kind of political system. Thus, in systems with few or no veto actors, decision coupling will be smoother in most instances because the adoption of a policy that is supported by the responsible minister is almost certain (Herweg et al., 2017). This is what happened in the case of Ghana, the political entrepreneur (the Lands and Forestry Minister) at the time was a cabinet minister and so had the backing of political leadership. And so after he and his policy team had convinced the government that the change was politically and technically feasible and that funding is available to support the process, the policy was implicitly adopted. What then was left was a few modifications to the policy proposal, and then the explicit adoption is done marked by the fanfare of a policy launch. Other stakeholders in the sector like chiefs, CSOs, community people, timber firms, timber marketing groups or associations, etc., were then dealt with on a separate level. This is because their input is expected not to make any significant changes to the draft policy proposal.
The Ghanaian case as illustrated above reveals the two possible expectations of the MSF regarding decision-making that this study aligns with (Herweg et al., 2017). The first is that policy adoption is more likely if the proposal is put forward by a government or majority party that is not constrained by other veto actors. Ghana's case shows that the policy entrepreneur who also qualifies as the political entrepreneur is part of the government, and since the forest policy is a cabinet-level policy, no veto actor existed at the cabinet level in Ghana to challenge the policy proposal, hence leading to its smooth adoption. The second posits that policy adoption is more likely if the problem that the policy is supposed to solve is salient among the voters. The paper has shown that the above problems (as seen in the problem stream) were key to the citizenry. As a matter of fact, it fed into the quality of lives of citizens, which was a key determinant of voters' choice in the 1996 general elections (F. K. G. Anebo, 1997). 9 It could be argued that the efforts of the Minister of Lands and Forestry together with his policy team to push the change agenda might have reduced the risk of electoral defeat for the incumbent.
Furthermore, in line with the MSF postulations, the above could not have taken place without an appropriate window (J. Kingdon, 1984). In view of that, a number of windows were identified that provided the context for coupling by the policy entrepreneurs. These included the 1992 Rio Summit which led to efforts by the government to enact the national environmental action plan, and the political transition to constitutional rule in 1992 which also gave an indication that governance was no longer going to be exercised arbitrarily but backed by laws and which required that institutional reforms were necessary. In the midst of all this, donor support was key as revealed by some of the interviewees.
Inferring from the above, it can be deduced that Ghana's policy change process was dominated and led by the government. The government had the power to call for changes at any point in the policy process, which makes the policy process top-down, elite-based, and political. That notwithstanding, the Ghanaian case clearly shows that the problem was clearly defined, the policy provided the needed solution, and the politics were right in the sense that policymakers were prepared for the change and supported the change process. Finally, the 1948 Forest Policy did not witness any change between 1948 and 1994 possibly because either the "soup" of ideas or solutions to the policy problems were inadequate or unattractive and so could not secure the interests of the decision-makers; or that a clear-cut policy window was not opened for policy entrepreneurs.

Conclusion and policy implication
This paper has successfully addressed the questions that directed it. From the above discussion, it has been revealed that the existing 1948 Forest Policy was challenged in a number of ways which is why it was changed. For instance, a well-coordinated implementation was lacking, because despite the interdependence of forest and wildlife, they were handled by different government departments. Also, community participation was very low and some chiefs were still complaining wanting a total transfer of power to them to manage the resources. There were also many cases of encroachment by illegal chain-saw operators, the incidence of wildfires was increasing, overgrazing in the savannah landscapes, and the persistence of illegal mining activities. The above challenges were not adequately addressed by the 1948 Policy and so policy entrepreneurs had to trigger the policy change process.
Again, how the policy was changed as the discussion above demonstrates, suggests that it was consistent with the postulations of the MSF. The policy entrepreneur otherwise referred to as the political entrepreneur had a smooth ride throughout the change process. This is because the forest policy is a cabinet-level policy, and so the policy proposal did not witness any strong opposition to counter its adoption. The policy entrepreneur was a cabinet minister and already had the backing of political leadership, all that was needed was to ensure that the policy reflected the interest of political leadership, and then it will be smoothly adopted. This was the strategy and it was read well by the policy entrepreneur hence making the policy adoption successful. It must be pointed out that the process of consultations and validation workshops were necessary and important in the policy change process to recognize the relevance of the key stakeholders in the sector, however, it did not significantly impact the content of the policy proposal that was to be adopted.
From the ensuing discussion, it could be deduced that the policy-making process in Ghana is hugely dominated by the government and its institutions, living little room for other stakeholders to participate. Again, the study has also shown that policy entrepreneurs are not always successful, and so to be successful an entrepreneur should have excellent contact with policymakers, be tactful, sensitive to his/her environment, resourceful, and possess some manipulative skills.
Ghana's case has clearly shown that the streams of problem, policy, and politics that were coupled through windows of opportunity by policy entrepreneurs resulted in the change from the 1948 Forest Policy to the 1994 FWP. Significantly, the Ghanaian case clearly reflects the two decision-making expectations that this study associates with, thus policy adoption is more likely if the proposal is put forward by a government or majority party that is not constrained by other veto actors, and then policy adoption is more likely if the problem that the policy is supposed to solve is salient among the voters. The nature of political governance in Ghana is such that government and its agencies wield enormous powers and resources against think tanks and other private actors, hence making them dominate the policy change process.
In conclusion, this paper recommends that participation should mean participation, and should not be used as a smoke screen to water down dissenting views to push government agenda through. In a situation where the government can terminate or initiate a change process at will, it makes the participation of other stakeholders less worthwhile and time-wasting. Going forward, Ghana's forest and wildlife sector can take a second look at the participatory structures at the community level in order to widen the participation net for a more inclusive policy change process.