THESIS ABSTRACT

Social-ecological sustainability challenges, from the local to the global level, are of increasing concern.

Stewardship has been proposed as a means of dealing with these challenges, but how can it be achieved in

practice? In South Africa, the concept is put into practice by practitioners working with local stewards to

facilitate more sustainable and equitable management of ecosystem services across landscapes. This

landscape approach requires collaboration between multiple stakeholders, as social-ecological processes

function beyond the boundaries of individual farms or villages.

The aim of this research was to investigate the practice of stewardship and collaboration in multifunctional

landscapes in South Africa through a transdisciplinary enquiry. This was achieved using a methodological

framework based on critical complexity, transdisciplinarity, and critical realism. This framework was applied

through an inductive, mixed methods research design which involved stewardship practitioners, stewards,

and other stakeholders in the research.

Practitioners’ understandings of the stewardship concept vary, yet they coalesce around the idea of

responsible use and care of nature. Accordingly, the primary role of stewards is to interact with nature

responsibly and carefully, balancing the use of ecosystem services for their own benefit with broader socialecological

interests and needs. Although the biodiversity stewardship tool dominates stewardship practice

in South Africa, more integrated social-ecological initiatives are also emerging, often hand-in-hand with this

approach.

Practitioners working in these initiatives face multiple interacting and mutually reinforcing enablers and

barriers that facilitate or hinder collaboration for stewardship. Individual and social-relational enablers are

pivotal to long-term sustainability of initiatives, whilst deep-seated inequalities and mistrust are significant

barriers to collaboration. Despite such challenges, practitioners are succeeding in fostering collaboration by

operating as hubs in the landscape. They are actively building new relationships and networks among diverse

stakeholders to address shared sustainability challenges. This results in a patchwork of collaborative

stewardship activity across the landscape, suggesting that stewardship and collaboration are fundamentally

relational processes and that pluralistic approaches to sustainability are needed in multifunctional

landscapes. Moreover, by re-focusing stewardship on stewards, practitioners are finding innovative ways to

enable farmers to appreciate and practice stewardship, addressing the conflict between agriculture and

conservation.

Drawing on these findings, a critical realist analysis revealed underlying generative mechanisms that help to

explain the challenges encountered in collaborative efforts toward stewardship. These mechanisms included,

amongst others: individual stewards’ values, societal constraints on the ability of stewards to express care,

conflict between agriculture and conservation due to dominant agricultural approaches and neoliberal

economic policies, and the divided and unequal nature of South African society.

Operationalising transdisciplinary research enabled meaningful engagement with practitioner partners,

allowing for novel insights and unexpected findings to emerge from practice-based knowledge. Putting

transdisciplinarity into practice revealed the dynamic and multi-faceted role that researchers can play in

transdisciplinary research, highlighting the importance of relational knowledge and competencies. Existing

support systems and incentives within universities need to be re-configured to enable postgraduate students

to conduct engaged science in service of society.

For further information, please contact us:

PhD Student: Jessica Cockburn: jessicacockburn[at]gmail.com | Cell: 072 1022 875

Supervisor: Dr. Georgina Cundill (georgina.cundill[at]gmail.com)

Co-supervisors: Prof Sheona Shackleton (s.shackleton[at]ru.ac.za) and Prof Mathieu Rouget (mathieu.rouget[at]cirad.fr)