Community-based conservation and pollinator health: Assessing the impact of CREMA in northern Ghana

Pollinators play a crucial role in ecosystem functioning, agricultural productivity, and food security, yet their populations are declining globally. While the drivers of pollinator decline are well documented in the Global North, less attention has been given to how local governance systems shape pollinator health in the Global South. In Sub-Saharan Africa, pollinator decline is increasingly linked to climatic variability, habitat degradation, bushfires, and the expansion of agrochemical use. In Ghana, Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) is implemented through the Community Resource Management Area (CREMA) model, a decentralized governance approach that empowers rural communities to manage biodiversity and natural resources. Although previous studies have examined CREMA’s contributions to forest conservation and rural livelihoods, its implications for pollinator health remain underexplored. In this study, pollinator health is conceptualized through farmers’ experiential observations of pollinator diversity, abundance, activity patterns, and mortality within agroecosystems, reflecting local interpretations of ecological change. To examine how conservation governance shapes these perceptions, this study employed a qualitative comparative design involving 64 farmers from eight rural communities in the Upper West and Savannah Regions of northern Ghana, including four CREMA and four non-CREMA communities. Using participatory photovoice grounded in political ecology, farmers documented and narrated their experiences of pollinators and environmental change. Thematic analysis revealed seven key themes: declining pollinator diversity, altered activity patterns, pollinator mortality, agrochemical exposure, habitat loss, local ecological knowledge, and community adaptation strategies. The findings demonstrate the importance of integrating farmers’ experiential ecological knowledge into pollinator conservation and decentralized environmental governance in Sub-Saharan Africa.