Aim  To examine the different uses and perceptions of introduced Australian acacias (wattles; Acacia subgenus Phyllodineae) by rural households and communities. Location  Eighteen landscape‐scale case studies around the world, in Vietnam, India, Réunion, Madagascar, South Africa, Congo, Niger, Ethiopia, Israel, France, Portugal, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic and Hawai‘i. Methods  Qualitative comparison of case studies, based on questionnaire sent to network of acacia researchers. Information based on individual knowledge of local experts, published and unpublished sources. Results  We propose a conceptual model to explain current uses and perceptions of introduced acacias. It highlights historically and geographically contingent processes, including economic development, environmental discourses, political context, and local or regional needs. Four main groupings of case studies were united by similar patterns: (1) poor communities benefiting from targeted agroforestry projects; (2) places where residents, generally poor, take advantage of a valuable resource already present in their landscape via plantation and/or invasion; (3) regions of small and mid‐scale tree farmers participating in the forestry industry; and (4) a number of high‐income communities dealing with the legacies of former or niche use of introduced acacia in a context of increased concern over biodiversity and ecosystem services. Main conclusions  Economic conditions play a key role shaping acacia use. Poorer communities rely strongly on acacias (often in, or escaped from, formal plantations) for household needs and, sometimes, for income. Middle‐income regions more typically host private farm investments in acacia woodlots for commercialization. Efforts at control of invasive acacias must take care to not adversely impact poor dependent communities.

Aim Anthropogenic introductions of Australian Acacia spp. that become classed as alien invasive species have consequences besides the physical, spatial and ecological: there are also cultural, ethical and political considerations that demand attention from scholars in the humanities and social sciences. As practitioners in these disciplines, our aim is to reflect upon some of the social and conceptual ideas and attitudes relating to the spread of Australian Acacia spp. around the world. We therefore provide a longer-term historical and philosophical perspective using South Africa as a key example. We explain some of the cultural aspects of Australian acacias, relating them to history, philosophy and societal ideas that were once, or indeed remain, important, either regarding their exportation from Australia or their importation into other countries. Focussing principally on South Africa and Australia but including brief references to other locations, we augment the literature by making connections between acacia introductions and environmental ethics and aesthetics, national and environmental history and symbolic and other discourses. We evaluate a number of the cultural and philosophical dimensions of invasion biology as a societal response and explicate the interesting contradiction of Australian acacia introductions as simultaneously economically valuable and environmentally transformative in South Africa.Location South Africa, Australia, with references to other parts of the world.Methods This paper has been written by an interdisciplinary team (two historians, two geographers, a philosopher and an ecologist) and is conceptual and historical, conforming in language and structure to the humanities style. It relies on published and unpublished literature from this disciplinary domain and the critical evaluation of these sources.Results Many Acacia spp. from Australia have been introduced around the world, generally guided in different eras by a variety of overarching mindsets, including the colonial ethos of 'improvement' (1800s to mid 1900s), an economically driven mindset of 'national development ' (1900s), by a people-centred frame combining concerns of environment and livelihood in 'sustainable development ' (1980s onwards), and an aesthetic ethos of ornamental planting that surfaces in all periods. The newest ethos of controlling or managing alien invasive species, a normative attitude deriving from the burgeoning of invasion biology, has more recently shaped the ideology of these plant exchanges and sharpened the focus on species that may be simultaneously both weeds and commercially valuable crops. Our perspective from the humanities and social sciences calls for a more transparent approach that clearly acknowledges such contradictions.Main conclusions We conclude that the global experiment of human-mediated Australian acacia introductions raises a number of issues that reflect changing societal concerns and demand attention from scholars in disciplines apart from

This essay explores the ways in which concepts of `scale' are deployed in political ecology to explain the outcomes of ecological and social change. It argues that political ecologists need to pay closer attention to how scale is produced and used to interpret the experience of spatiotemporal difference and change so as to make ecology the object of politics, policy-making and political action. It outlines an alternative approach that focuses on how three moments of action — operation, observation, and interpretation — work together to produce scale as a configuration and range of values that articulate differential sensibilities and political differences regarding changes to socialized landscapes. The essay uses examples from studies of plant movements to illustrate how scope and scale combine to `enframe' and interpret ecological and related social change as `disruption' to places, regional `transformation', or as regionalized `evolution'.

The new South African Constitution, together with later policies and legislation, affirm a commitment to gender rights that is incompatible with the formal recognition afforded to unelected traditional authorities. This contradiction is particularly evident in the case of land reform in many rural areas, where women's right of access to land is denied through the practice of customary law. This article illustrates the ways in which these constitutional contradictions play out with particular intensity in the 'former homelands' through the example of a conflict over land use in Buffelspruit, Mpumalanga province. There, a number of women who had been granted informal access to communal land for the purposes of subsistence cultivation had their rights revoked by the traditional authority. Despite desperate protests, they continue to be marginalized in terms of access to land, while their male counterparts appropriate communal land for commercial farming and cattle grazing. Drawing on this protest, we argue that current South African practice in relation to the pressing issue of gender equity in land reform represents a politics of accommodation and evasion that tends to reinforce gender biases in rural development, and in so doing, undermines the prospects for genuinely radical transformation of the instituted geographies and institutionalized practices bequeathed by the apartheid regime.

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