Relational hubs for collaborative landscape stewardship
- Authors: Cockburn, Jessica J , Cundill, Georgina , Shackleton, Sheona E , Cele, Ayanda , Cornelius, Susanna F , Koopman, Vaughan , Le Roux, Jean-Pierre , McLeod, Nicky , Rouget, Mathieu , Schroder, Samantha , Van den Broek, Dieter , Wright, Dale R , Zwinkelse, Marijn
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/392748 , vital:68789 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08941920.2019.1658141"
- Description: Landscape stewardship is considered an important place-based approach to addressing sustainability challenges. Working at landscape-level requires collaboration between diverse landscape stakeholders. In this study, we partnered with local stewardship practitioners across six cases in South Africa to investigate how they facilitate collaboration towards social-ecological sustainability outcomes. We found that practitioners facilitate collaboration among stakeholders by operating as relational hubs in the landscape. Through these hubs, they build new inter-personal relationships among stakeholders, creating social networks which enable stewardship practice. The hubs deepen human-nature relationships by creating enabling conditions for stewards to put stewardship ethics into action. Drawing on insights from these cases, we call for a relational approach to landscape stewardship which focuses on human-to-human and human-to-nature relationships. Moreover, we argue that landscape stewardship initiatives need to re-focus stewardship on stewards, recognizing them as key agents of change in addressing the conflict between agriculture and conservation inherent in many landscapes.
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- Date Issued: 2020
Collaborative stewardship in multifunctional landscapes: toward relational, pluralistic approaches
- Authors: Cockburn, Jessica J , Cundell, Georgina , Shackleton, Sheona E , Rouget, Mathieu , Zwinkels, Marijn , Cornelius, Susanna A , Metcalf, Liz , van den Broek, D
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/390297 , vital:68535 , xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11085-240432"
- Description: Landscape stewardship offers a means to put social-ecological approaches to stewardship into practice. The growing interest in landscape stewardship has led to a focus on multistakeholder collaboration. Although there is a significant body of literature on collaborative management and governance of natural resources, the particular challenges posed by multifunctional landscapes, in which there are often contested interests, require closer attention. We present a case study from South Africa to investigate how collaborative stewardship can be fostered in contested multifunctional landscapes. We conducted this research through an engaged transdisciplinary research partnership in which we integrated social-ecological practitioner and academic knowledge to gain an in-depth understanding of the challenges of fostering collaboration. We identified five overarching factors that influence collaboration: contextual, institutional, social-relational, individual, and political-historical. Collaborative stewardship approaches focused on the development of formal governance institutions appear to be most successful if enabling individual and social-relational conditions are in place. Our case study, characterized by high social diversity, inequity, and contestation, suggests that consensus-driven approaches to collaboration are unlikely to result in equitable and sustainable landscape stewardship in such contexts. We therefore suggest an approach that focuses on enhancing individual and social-relational enablers. Moreover, we propose a bottom-up patchwork approach to collaborative stewardship premised on the notion of pluralism. This would focus on building new interpersonal relationships and collaborative capacity through small collective actions. Taking a relational, pluralistic approach to fostering collaborative stewardship is particularly important in contested, socially heterogeneous landscapes. Drawing on our study and the literature, we propose guiding principles for implementing relational, pluralistic approaches to collaborative stewardship and suggest future research directions for supporting such approaches.
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- Date Issued: 2019
The meaning and practice of stewardship in South Africa
- Authors: Cockburn, Jessica J , Cundill, Georgina , Shackleton, Sheona E , Rouget, Mathieu
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: To be catalogued
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/390683 , vital:68574 , xlink:href="http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/sajs.2019/5339"
- Description: Stewardship offers a means of addressing social-ecological sustainability challenges, from the local to the global level. The concept of stewardship has had various meanings attached to it over time, and the links between the theory and practice of stewardship are not well understood. We sought to characterise the practice of stewardship in South Africa, to better understand the relationship between theory and practice. We found that practitioners’ understandings of stewardship coalesce around two core notions: the idea of stewardship as ‘responsible use and care’ of nature, and stewardship as a ‘balancing act’ between stewards’ use of natural resources for agricultural production and their responsibility to protect and manage the wider ecosystem. Stewardship practice in South Africa is strongly influenced by the biodiversity stewardship tool; however, many practitioners are integrating biodiversity stewardship with other approaches. These emerging social-ecological stewardship initiatives operate at landscape-level and work towards integrated social and ecological stewardship outcomes, by facilitating collaboration among diverse stakeholders. Further research is needed to better understand what is required to support these integrated, collaborative and cross-sectoral initiatives. Policy mechanisms that facilitate integrated place-based stewardship practice can contribute to expanding the practice of biodiversity stewardship in South Africa.
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- Date Issued: 2019