Collaborative stewardship in multifunctional landscapes: toward relational, pluralistic approaches

Abstract

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 indepth 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.

A Relational Approach to Landscape Stewardship: Towards a New Perspective for Multi-Actor Collaboration

“…The two cases were chosen as examples of landscape stewardship in which multi-actor collaboration is an intended purpose of the initiative, yet participants are finding collaboration challenging [17,31] (Box 1 and 2). We present the cases by giving an outline of the social-ecological context of each case and its objectives, and by providing a specific focus around a shared matter of interest or 'object of activity' ('Object of activity' is a term used in Cultural Historical Activity Theory, which underpins Edwards' work on the gardening tools [55], to denote the complex problem which is the focus of collaboration [56].)…”

“…It is an agricultural area which mostly consists of commercial fruit production [64]. The landscape is socially and ecologically heterogeneous, with high diversity in terms of the economic, socio-cultural, and political background of people living in the landscape (Figure 2) [17]. Social groups are dynamic and diverse in ethnicity.…”

“…Social groups are dynamic and diverse in ethnicity. There is contestation around access to land and water resources among historically disparate groups, i.e., 'white' commercial farmers and 'coloured' people whose ancestors were dispossessed of land [17]. The area has high biodiversity with many endemic species.…”

“…Moreover, they are often seen as integral components or practices within more broadly conceptualised landscape stewardship approaches [15]. Out of this growing body of conceptual and empirical work on the social dimensions of landscape stewardship has emerged a focus on relationality [16][17][18], that is, we are seeing a relational turn [19,20]. This has been accompanied by a rapid growth in literature on relationality in related fields like conservation [21] and sustainability science [18,22].…”

“…While these actors all potentially share an interest in the landscape as a whole, each has different interests in the system, and comes with differing backgrounds, values, expertise, knowledge, and cultural practices. These actors are also located within a particular historical context of the landscape [17]. This means that collaborating for landscape stewardship is boundary-crossing work [30], whereby the different actors need to acknowledge the relevance of working outside of their usual domain (e.g., a farmer managing his farm, or a researcher working in the university) to work together to steward the landscape.…”