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Non-technical summaryNature and culture are intricately linked and the rapid loss of both biological and cultural diversity around the globe has led to increasing concerns about its effects on sustainability. Important efforts to understand biocultural relations and bolster sustainable practices have been made by scientists, local communities, civil society organizations and policy makers. In spite of their efforts, a stronger articulation between sectors and biocultural discourses is needed for a broader transformative impact. Here, we analyse the connections between prominent biocultural discourses and discuss how the biocultural paradigm can contribute to both local and global sustainability.

Policy affecting the rangeland commons in South Africa has been based largely on management models developed for large-scale commercial farming. This paper examines the current policy situation and discusses some of the most pervasive ecological and economic assumptions that have influenced development in the rangeland commons: that increasing livestock sales and full-time commercial farming are the best way to improve productivity and resource management; that communal rangelands are invariably overstocked and degraded and that destocking, fencing and rotational grazing are required to address this; and that communal tenure per se is the root cause of degradation and privatisation is the answer. A wealth of research now shows that these assumptions, while they may be suited to commercial agriculture on large land holdings, are an inappropriate basis for policy on rangeland commons. Instead, policy should support multiple livelihoods to enhance resilience and reduce risk, support the aims and overcome the disadvantages of smallholder farmers, strengthen common property management and tenure security, and integrate livestock development with a broader development agenda. Rangeland commons differ in their ecological, social and economic characteristics. Policy thus needs to apply a variety of ecological and economic models appropriate to different contexts.

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Large-mammal herbivore populations are subject to the interaction of internal density-dependent processes and external environmental stochasticity. We disentangle these processes by linking consumer population dynamics, in a highly stochastic environment, to the availability of their key forage resource via effects on body condition and subsequent fecundity and mortality rates. Body condition and demographic rate data were obtained by monitoring 500 tagged female goats in the Richtersveld National Park, South Africa, over a three-year period. Identifying the key resource and pathway to density dependence for a population allows environmental stochasticity to be partitioned into that which has strong feedbacks to population stability, and that which does not. Our data reveal a density- dependent seasonal decline in goat body condition in response to concomitant density-dependent depletion of the dry-season forage resource. The loss in body condition reduced density-dependent pregnancy rates, litter sizes, and pre-weaning survival. Survival was lowest following the most severe dry season and for juveniles. Adult survival in the late-dry season depended on body condition in the mid-dry season. Population growth was determined by the length of the dry season and the population size in the previous year. The RNP goat population is thereby dynamically coupled primarily to its dry-season forage resource. Extreme environmental variability thus does not decouple consumer resource dynamics, in contrast to the views of nonequilibrium protagonists.

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