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Tropical forests are facing mounting pressures from deforestation, climate change, and biodiversity loss, resulting in increasingly complex conservation challenges worldwide. In response, “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation” (REDD+) emerged in 2007 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as a pivotal climate mitigation strategy. Since its inception, REDD+ has evolved from small-scale pilot projects to broader jurisdictional and landscape-level approaches that emphasize collaboration among multiple stakeholders to align shared objectives, coordinate collective action, and balance competing land-use demands across social, environmental, and economic spheres, with the overarching goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions while advancing sustainable development. However, implementing such collaborative programs in politically contested tropical forest landscapes, characterized by diverse stakeholders, competing claims, and entrenched power dynamics, presents significant governance challenges. Despite growing recognition of collaborative governance as essential to the success of such REDD+ programs, theoretical frameworks to guide their design and implementation in Global South contexts remain underexplored, leaving a critical knowledge gap in this rapidly evolving field.

This thesis addresses that gap by examining how collaborative governance arrangements are designed and function within cocoa forest landscapes in Ghana. Using qualitative research methods, this thesis integrates the Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance (IFCG) with decentralization theory, creating a novel analytical lens that reveals the enabling conditions and constraints for cross-sector and multi-level coordination in contexts characterized by limited resources, tenure insecurity, competing land-use pressures, and corruption. The study focuses on the Ghana Cocoa Forest REDD+ Programme (GCFRP) as a critical case of collaborative environmental governance, comprising four interrelated papers. These papers investigate: (1) unravelling collaborative governance dynamics in subnational REDD+ implementation; (2) the impact of system context on the drivers for the emergence of REDD+ collaborative governance regimes; (3) evaluating the perceived process performance and policy outputs in collaborative REDD+ program design; and (4) interrogating the effects of institutional design on perceived local legitimacy in multi-level REDD+ governance settings.

The findings from these studies demonstrate that the system context of tropical deforestation acts as a strong catalyst for collaboration, as weak governance and capacity constraints intersect with urgent social and environmental crises to drive collective action. Second, institutional design is crucial for collaborative outcomes: inappropriate local institutional structures weaken perceived legitimacy, thereby affecting stakeholder acceptance and program support. Incorporating decentralization theory reveals critical gaps in the IFCG, which, developed mainly from cases in the Global North, emphasizes broad participation and voluntary cooperation. Meanwhile, this research shows that in Global South contexts, the representativeness of participating actors, their decision-making power, and accountability are key factors for successful collaboration. Overall, this thesis advances collaborative governance theory by highlighting the political dimensions and power dynamics involved in combating deforestation and by demonstrating that strategic engagement with capable actors and external climate finance can energize collective efforts and foster a shared vision for sustainable land use in contested tropical landscapes.