A coalition of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs)working in environmental and natural resource governance has endorsed sweeping constitutional reform proposals put forward by the Constitution Review Committee (CRC), while warning that the government’s window to act is closing against the backdrop of Ghana’s worsening illegal mining crisis.
The groups, convening under the Citizens’ Platform on Constitutional Reform (CPCR) and including the Centre for Democratic Development, One Ghana Movement, A Rocha Ghana, Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF Ghana), Eco-Conscious Citizens, the Youth Alliance for Green Ghana, SEND Ghana and others, issued a statement on Tuesday, 16 June, renewing the Platform’s call on government to publish a clear roadmap and timelines for the constitutional reform process.
At the centre of the coalition’s endorsement is the CRC report, Transforming Ghana: From Electoral Democracy to Developmental Democracy, which the CSOs say proposes a fundamental rethink of how the country governs its environment, land and natural resources.
The headline recommendation is the entrenchment of a public trust doctrine in the Constitution, vesting all minerals, water resources, public lands and other natural resources in the people of Ghana with the State holding them in trust for present and future generations.
The coalition wants this paired with binding fiduciary obligations on public authorities responsible for land and resource administration, a legal duty of care campaigners argue is currently weak or unenforceable.
The statement set out several specific elements of the CRC report the coalition wants carried through into the final constitutional text. It endorsed twelve constitutional principles, among them intergenerational equity, free, prior and informed consent, and the precautionary principle, to replace the current Article 36(9), which campaigners have long criticised as non-justiciable and, therefore, unenforceable in court.
It also backed tighter limits on compulsory acquisition of land, restricting it to clear public purposes with fair and equitable compensation, two-stage parliamentary oversight, and dedicated Community Benefit and Heritage Funds, alongside a proposal to establish a Natural Resource Commission.
The coalition further welcomed the constitutional recognition of ecocide as an offence, though it urged Parliament to legislate a precise definition of its scope.
It also demanded that the proposed enforcement framework, covering justiciability of fiduciary breaches, mandatory annual audits and provision for public interest litigation, not be diluted as the proposals move through the legislative process.
The statement was not uncritical of the CRC’s work. The coalition identified four specific gaps in the report: the absence of an operationalised mechanism for the civic duty already set out in Article 41(k) of the Constitution; silence on the polluter-pays principle; the lack of explicit protection for environmental defenders; and the absence of a proposal for a specialised Environmental and Natural Resources Court.
The coalition’s central message to government was one of urgency. Citing the galamsey crisis and the accelerating loss of forest cover and water resources, the CSOs called for the immediate publication of the full CRC report, a roadmap with defined timelines, and disclosure of the legislative and referendum calendar required under Articles 289 to 291 of the Constitution, the provisions governing how entrenched constitutional clauses may be amended.
The statement explicitly warned against environmental provisions being deferred or diluted as the reform process proceeds.
The Platform said it remained ready to support civic education and technical work on the reforms, while keeping the voices of affected communities, those most exposed to land degradation, water pollution and the fallout of illegal mining, central to the process.
If adopted, the public trust doctrine and fiduciary-obligation framework would mark a structural change in Ghana’s resource governance, shifting natural resources from assets administered largely at ministerial and executive discretion to assets held under an enforceable legal trust, with citizens able to sue over breaches.
Articles 289 to 291 entrench amendment procedures precisely because changes of this kind, touching land, chieftaincy and fundamental rights, require both parliamentary supermajorities and, in many cases, a referendum.
That procedural threshold is itself central to the coalition’s complaint: without a published roadmap and calendar, there is no public benchmark against, which to measure whether the government is moving toward implementation or allowing the recommendations to stall.
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