broader view of stewardship to achieve conservation and sustainability goals in South Africa

Abstract

Stewardship is a popular term for the principles and actions aimed at improving sustainability and resilience of social-ecological systems at various scales and in different contexts. Participation in stewardship is voluntary, and is based on values of altruism and long-term benefits. At a global scale, ‘earth stewardship’ is viewed as a successor to earlier natural resource management systems. However, in South Africa, stewardship is narrowly applied to biodiversity conservation agreements on private land. Using a broader definition of stewardship, we identify all potentially related schemes that may contribute to sustainability and conservation outcomes. Stewardship schemes and actors are represented as a social network and placed in a simple typology based on objectives, mechanisms of action and operational scales. The predominant type was biodiversity stewardship programmes. The main actors were environmental non-governmental organisations participating in prominent bioregional landscape partnerships, together acting as important ‘bridging organisations’ within local stewardship networks. This bridging enables a high degree of collaboration between non-governmental and governmental bodies, especially provincial conservation agencies via mutual projects and conservation objectives. An unintended consequence may be that management accountability is relinquished or neglected by government because of inadequate implementation capacity. Other stewardship types, such as market-based and landscape initiatives, complemented primarily biodiversity ones, as part of national spatial conservation priorities. Not all schemes related to biodiversity, especially those involving common pool resources, markets and supply chains. Despite an apparent narrow biodiversity focus, there is evidence of diversification of scope to include more civic and community-level stewardship activities, in line with the earth stewardship metaphor.

Sustaining rural livelihoods through an integrated landscape approach

“…A decisive factor for failure is that biased income allocation in favour of asset-rich households causes unsustainable increases in cattle stocks and growing demand for grazing land coupled with increased deforestation. Our analysis confi rms the argument of Barendse et al (2016) that an important limiting factor of CBNRM success is the government's inadequate implementation capacity, implying that local stakeholders have limited opportunities to develop natural resource stewardship. An operational landscape approach therefore requires a multiplescales polycentric governance architecture as proposed by Ostrom (2012).…”

Towards Place-Based Research to Support Social–Ecological Stewardship

“…There is also a wide range of approaches to stewardship practice purported to be more bottom-up, for example community-based natural resource management initiatives, and integrated landscape approaches. Further details on the practical applications of stewardship can be found in, amongst others, Carr [34], Bennett et al [13], Barendse et al [14] and Bieling and Plieninger [17].…”

Sustainable biodiversity stewardship and inclusive development in South Africa: a novel package for a sustainable future

“…The institutional capacity and arrangements needed for SBS require support from government [16] This article assesses the financial instruments and benefits that can incentivise SBS focusing on (a) agreements, (b) income tax deductions, (c) property rates exclusions, (d) benefits, and (e) capacity building and skills development.…”

“…Additionally, though it has been recognized that SBS can provide many benefits, initiatives to advance SBS in these countries where a large portion of natural land is privately owned are difficult to develop because more pressing issues such as poverty and ill-health often take precedence over the goals of nature conservation. The move towards inclusive development thinking [1 ] begins to add a stronger rigor to making socioeconomic concerns and the environment more evenly matched and inclusive [15,16]. It is, therefore, an important step forward to couch the SBS debates on incentives against this backdrop and in the context of ID, as an overarching, macro scale framework [1 ].…”

“…create jobs, promote rural development) and ecological (e.g. protect ecosystems, mitigate risks) objectives of the program [3 , 16]. Kamal et al [10 ] also report that the implementation and success of such programs depend on the relationship between managers and landowners.…”