Harry Biggs’s research while affiliated with Rhodes University and other places

Innovative, pragmatic approaches are needed to support sustainable livelihoods and landscape management in complex social-ecological systems (CSES) such as river catchments. In the Tsitsa River Catchment, South Africa, researchers and natural resource managers have come together to apply such innovative approaches. Since CSES are characterised by uncertainty and surprise, understanding and managing them requires a commitment to reflexive praxis and transdisciplinarity. Accordingly, we facilitated a collective reflection and learning process in the project team to deepen our understanding of praxis in CSES. Our findings indicate that CSES thinking created an enabling framing. However, building new linkages among diverse actors to put CSES thinking into practice is challenging, since it requires the development of novel working relationships. Existing institutional structures, power dynamics, and ways of working impose significant constraints. A deeper critical realist analysis of our findings revealed a metaphor which explains why this work is challenging. In this metaphor, the Tsitsa Project team is navigating a bumpy terrain of dialectic tensions. These are tensions for example between natural science and social science, and between science and indigenous knowledge. Based on this metaphor, we suggest an expanding role for scientists and managers, and recommend transformative social learning processes to support teams navigating such bumpy terrains.

Adaptive management (AM) and evidence-based conservation (EBC) have emerged as major decision-making frameworks for conservation management. AM deals with complexity and the importance of local context in making conservation decisions under conditions of high variability, uncertainty, and rapid environmental and social change. EBC seeks for generality from empirical data and aims to develop and enhance best practice. The goal of this review is to explore opportunities for finding common ground between AM and EBC. We propose a framework for distinguishing the subset of conservation problems that are amenable to an evidence-based approach, based on levels of uncertainty, complexity, and social agreement. We then suggest ways for combining multiple lines of evidence and developing greater opportunities for iteration and co-learning in EBC.

There is growing appreciation that protected areas, like all social-ecological systems (SES), are inherently complex and face an unpredictable future under the influence of global environmental change. Adaptive management is the accepted approach for managing complex SES to ensure their resilience, but unless it is supported by a governance system that is itself adaptive it has little chance of success. Scholars have identified certain principles conducive to adaptive governance. Environmental legislation, an important component of the governance system, is often misaligned with these principles. In this paper we assess adaptive governance principles with regard to legislation governing South Africa’s national parks. This assessment indicates that, to enable adaptive governance and adaptive management, legislation should (1) be co-produced by policy-makers, policy implementers and users of protected area ecosystem services; (2) commit and empower management agencies to apply the principles of adaptive governance and adaptive management, particularly in the collaborative development of management plans; (3) commit agencies to review management plans and allow flexibility to adapt plans; (4) ensure that the temporal and spatial scales of the governance system match those of the SES being managed; (5) anticipate change and avoid assumptions of system stability and predictability; and (6) provide for flexible financing mechanisms, so that funds can be prioritised and timed to meet the unpredictable demands of complex systems.

The purpose of this document is to develop an initial research investment strategy for the Tsitsa sub-catchment of the Mzimvubu catchment in the Maclear area of the Eastern Cape. The impetus was provided by plans to construct the tenth largest dam in South Africa, Ntabelanga Dam in the ~20 000 km2 catchment, situated in a high relief landscape with erodible soils and a history of land degradation and lost productive capacity. A subsequent dam, the Lalini Dam, will be constructed slightly lower down in the Tsitsa system. The project has been estimated to cost between R12.5 and R20 billion. Although this report deals with the Ntabelanga Dam research opportunity, the same principles (with further learnings) are foundational for the entire project. The macro-context for the project is provided by government’s Strategic Infrastructure Investment Projects (SIPs) and a range of national, provincial and local strategies, plus, importantly, several of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (the appropriate ones are listed in Appendix A).

Protected areas (PAs) remain central to the conservation of biodiversity. Classical PAs were conceived as areas that would be set aside to maintain a natural state with minimal human influence. However, global environmental change and growing cross-scale anthropogenic influences mean that PAs can no longer be thought of as ecological islands that function independently of the broader social-ecological system in which they are located. For PAs to be resilient (and to contribute to broader social-ecological resilience), they must be able to adapt to changing social and ecological conditions over time in a way that supports the long-term persistence of populations, communities, and ecosystems of conservation concern. We extend Ostrom's social-ecological systems framework to consider the long-term persistence of PAs, as a form of land use embedded in social-ecological systems, with important cross-scale feedbacks. Most notably, we highlight the cross-scale influences and feedbacks on PAs that exist from the local to the global scale, contextualizing PAs within multi-scale social-ecological functional landscapes. Such functional landscapes are integral to understand and manage individual PAs for long-term sustainability. We illustrate our conceptual contribution with three case studies that highlight cross-scale feedbacks and social-ecological interactions in the functioning of PAs and in relation to regional resilience. Our analysis suggests that while ecological, economic, and social processes are often directly relevant to PAs at finer scales, at broader scales, the dominant processes that shape and alter PA resilience are primarily social and economic.

This book is available online at http://press.anu.edu.au

Protected areas (PAs) remain central to the conservation of biodiversity. Classical PAs were conceived as areas that would be set aside to maintain a natural state with minimal human influence. However, global environmental change and growing cross-scale anthropogenic influences mean that PAs can no longer be thought of as ecological islands that function independently of the broader social-ecological system in which they are located. For PAs to be resilient (and to contribute to broader social-ecological resilience), they must be able to adapt to changing social and ecological conditions over time in a way that supports the long-term persistence of populations, communities, and ecosystems of conservation concern. We extend Ostrom's social-ecological systems framework to consider the long-term persistence of PAs, as a form of land use embedded in social-ecological systems, with important cross-scale feedbacks. Most notably, we highlight the cross-scale influences and feedbacks on PAs that exist from the local to the global scale, contextualizing PAs within multi-scale social-ecological functional landscapes. Such functional landscapes are integral to understand and manage individual PAs for long-term sustainability. We illustrate our conceptual contribution with three case studies that highlight cross-scale feedbacks and social-ecological interactions in the functioning of PAs and in relation to regional resilience. Our analysis suggests that while ecological, economic, and social processes are often directly relevant to PAs at finer scales, at broader scales, the dominant processes that shape and alter PA resilience are primarily social and economic