Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how NbS interventions in South Africa’s former homelands interact with postcolonial land legacies, exploring how restoration programs reinforce or contest historical hierarchies in rangeland privatization and redistribution

Presentation long abstract

This paper investigates the postcolonial politics of nature-based solutions (NbS) in South Africa’s former Bantustans, focusing on the intersection of historical dispossession, land reform, and rangeland privatization. Multilateral and NGO-led NbS programs increasingly promote ecosystem restoration, climate resilience, and biodiversity conservation in these landscapes. Yet these interventions are embedded in territories shaped by colonial and apartheid-era land allocation, ongoing struggles over tenure, and contested access to resources. Using a postcolonial political lens, the paper explores how NbS interventions interact with, reinforce, or challenge historical hierarchies. It asks: How are notions of “restoration” and “sustainability” framed in a postcolonial context? Whose knowledge and labor are privileged, and how do local communities navigate global environmental agendas? Drawing on policy documents, project reports, and field-based accounts from land reform beneficiaries and communal rangeland users, the paper examines the frictions between global environmental governance and postcolonial land politics. By connecting high-level NbS frameworks to place-based experiences, the study highlights how ecological restoration is never neutral but politically charged, reflecting and sometimes reproducing postcolonial inequalities. The analysis contributes to scholarship on postcolonial state theory, land governance, and ecological imaginaries, emphasizing that rangeland NbS initiatives both shape and are shaped by historical legacies, local contestations, and ongoing struggles over land and livelihoods.

Presentation short abstract

Through a short desktop documentary of five soil carbon offset projects in Southern Africa, I highlight the visual, discursive, and cognitive processes that shape the construction of ‘restoration economies’ on rangelands.

Presentation long abstract

Soil carbon and biodiversity offsets on rangelands are emerging as new investment frontiers that draw in a wide array of stakeholders, including social enterprises, universities, climate-tech firms, fintech consultancies, entrepreneurs, and carbon-emitting multinationals. Focusing on five rangeland-restoration projects in Southern Africa - and informed by the process of archiving, reading, tabulating, and investigating 54 Verra-registered soil carbon-offset projects- I present a short desktop documentary and use digital ethnographic methods (Pink 2013, 2015) to show how myths, narratives, and imaginaries are mobilized by these actors in different ways online and in practice.

In this case, audio-visual storytelling complements written analysis by more effectively highlighting the visual, discursive, and cognitive mechanisms that construct ‘restoration economies’ or new ‘economies of repair’ (Fairhead et al., 2012; Huff & Brock, 2023) on rangelands.

These case studies demonstrate that, although restoration narratives vary slightly across rangeland contexts, they consistently reproduce long-standing myths about livestock production systems, grassland ecologies, human–environment relations, and dominant cultural imaginaries of “nature”. Most of the soil-carbon initiatives examined reinforce historical legacies of land injustice, promote ranch-style grazing management ideals, and instrumentalize grazing livestock as a carbon-offset technology rather than acknowledging them as living animals and sources of nutrition and livelihoods. This is problematic because the design of these types of rangeland restoration projects recycles colonial “solutions” and ironically continues to reward the destructive legacy of large-scale, commercially oriented, livestock-management models rather than supporting mobile-based, small-scale realities of pastoral and smallholder animal husbandry.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation reflects on socioecological changes occurring with carbon projects in eastern and southern African rangelands. Focusing on domestic and wild species being (re)introduced to enhance sequestration, we consider what a multispecies lens reveals about power in rangeland carbon projects.

Presentation long abstract

As the world scrambles to avert ecological catastrophe, carbon offsetting projects have become a defining climate mitigation strategy of our era. Growing demand for carbon credits has seen millions of hectares acquired for new carbon projects in the global South, where land is perceived as readily available and easily converted to uses that sequester carbon at scale. Political ecology has a strong history of engaging with the socioeconomic risks and harms of carbon projects; but as increasingly diverse carbon projects are expanded into increasingly diverse contexts, there is a need to understand the interrelated ecological implications of the ongoing carbon rush.

This presentation considers the socioecological transformations associated with carbon projects in rangelands – shared by humans, livestock, and wildlife – across eastern and southern Africa. Drawing from two years of research, we reveal how rangeland carbon projects are altering human-nature relations and giving rise to novel multispecies communities; for example, by introducing new grass species, replacing cattle and other livestock breeds with ‘improved’ species, and recovering wild fauna. With the promise of increasing carbon sequestration in soil and vegetation, rangeland carbon projects are altering socioecological systems and trajectories across the region.

In response, we ask: What species are being enrolled in rangeland carbon projects, by who, and why? How do these interact with other species in project areas? To what extent are humans differentially affected by these changes? And what, if anything, new can a multispecies lens reveal about the workings of power in rangeland carbon projects specifically?

Presentation short abstract

What does a One Health workforce in Sub-Saharan African rangelands looks like? What is the on-the-ground work of One Health in rangelands? Who does this work of rangeland One Health? Through what practices and with what knowledge(s)? This presentation begins to examine these questions.

Presentation long abstract

There are ongoing efforts to develop and strengthen a global One Health workforce to address the multiple and overlapping socio-ecological planetary crises. With rangelands accounting for approximately 54% of the Earth’s surface (and 50% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s), they are increasingly central to One Health discourses and attention. Rangelands are looked at as simultaneously threatened by socio-ecological crises, while being positioned as yielding enormous potential for promoting and sustaining One Health and related resiliency from the local to the planetary scale. This paper starts with a fairly basic question; asking what a One Health workforce in Sub-Saharan African rangelands looks like?

While not necessarily a nature-based strategy itself, many nature-based strategies, techniques, and discourses are mobilised to enhance and promote One Health and related animal-human-ecological well-being. This is especially so in rangelands where One Health often focuses on landscape scale restoration, conservation, and resiliency. It also involves a budding array of multidisciplinary and multisectoral taskforces, in addition to individual pastoralists, farmers, and the communities they belong as they become enrolled in promoting rangeland health and resiliency through their agro-pastoral practices. Crucially, One Health is an approach, and increasingly a field of knowledge and practice. It is something that, if it is to have a material effect, must be done. This brings up important questions about what the actual on-the-ground work of One Health in rangelands looks like, who does this work of rangeland One Health, through what practices, and with what knowledge(s). This presentation begins to examine these questions.

Presentation short abstract

We look at how rangelands fit into carbon accounting. Rangelands are misclassified as forests, unimproved grasslands, or empty land. This renders them as ‘available’ spaces for carbon sequestration, while not recognising unique challenges they face to ensure sustainability in a changing climate.

Presentation long abstract

Rangelands cover 50% of the earth’s land surface and are unique ecosystems driven by fluctuating rainfall and temperature, fire regimes, and grazing mobility. Surprisingly, they do not feature as a land-use category under IPCC's Land Use, Land-Use Change, and Forestry (LULUCF) carbon accounting guidelines. As a result, when countries compile national emission inventories, rangelands become either ‘forest’, ‘unimproved grassland’, or ‘other land’. Under assumptions of universal drivers of linear carbon accumulation, afforestation, woody encroachment, grazing exclusion, fire exclusion, and agricultural intensification become ‘countable’ sources of carbon sequestration. Consequently, interventions considered negative for rangelands are misread as climate action. We ask why rangelands were excluded as a distinct category within LULUCF accounting and what this omission implies for South African rangelands today. Drawing from the perspective of political ecology, we explore this question through a document analysis of LULUCF guidelines, the informing IPCC meeting reports, and South African policy stemming from them. We find that LULUCF land use categories were politically decided, and misclassification of rangelands intentional. These classifications prioritise easily ‘measurable’ forms of carbon over ecological integrity, and echo colonial-era environmental narratives. Rangelands are left with a dual problem: misclassification as marginal, deforested, ‘unimproved’ or empty landscapes ripe for intervention, while not recognising the unique challenges they face in ensuring sustainable utilisation and resilience in a changing climate. As pressure mounts for carbon dioxide removal, we urgently need to revisit how we classify rangelands and count carbon to prevent irreversible losses of major ecosystems and the livelihoods they support.

Presentation short abstract

Markets assume grazing associations operate as economic units, aggregating livestock and standardising land-use. In practice, people also follow moral logics of equality, status, and obligation. Scaling land stewardship in communal areas needs to work with this social architecture, not against it.

Presentation long abstract

Nature-based solutions (NbS) are increasingly promoted as integrated responses to ecological degradation, climate change, and rural poverty in South Africa’s rangelands. Incentive-based mechanisms have rapidly expanded to help NbS scale out and sustain land stewardship. For example, Herding for Health uses carbon and livestock markets to promote collective rotational grazing in communal areas. The intervention works through grazing associations expected to function as economic units, aggregating livestock for marketing, standardising practices, and distributing incentives. In practice, this market logic of scale encounters people navigating uneven and uncertain power dynamics. Drawing on five months of qualitative fieldwork with two grazing associations in the Eastern Cape, we ask what factors shape participation in the intervention over time, including how access, civic standing, and influence differ across age, gender, and status.

The study finds that decisions are shaped by multiple and competing moral logics of equality, status, contribution, and obligation, embedded in chronic liminality produced by dispossession, repeated cycles of intervention, and hybrid governance. Factors such as elected leadership and local divisions influence access, while civic standing is associated with livestock ownership, lineage, and knowledge. Influence over land stewardship through fire, livestock, and mobilisation often comes from outside formal processes, including kin-mediated arrangements. These dynamics complicate assumptions that associations will operate as effective economic units for scaling NbS, and raise questions about their legitimacy and equity in the governance of fire, collective herds, and carbon revenue, ultimately calling for land stewardship designed from the social architecture already shaping behaviour in the commons.

Presentation short abstract

Applying an epistemic justice lens, I examine how dominant narratives that attribute rangeland degradation to pastoralism persist despite uncertainties and counter-evidence, revealing how some ways of knowing are privileged and how resulting policy interventions produce significant justice concerns.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation examines how different epistemic communities construct evidence and interpret pastoralism’s role in rangeland degradation in Namaqualand’s Succulent Karoo. Given that approximately 80% of South Africa consists of rangelands, much of it under communal tenure, debates about degradation have significant implications for pastoralist land rights and livelihoods. Drawing on a database of 170 publications used to construct a co-authorship network, alongside an in-depth discourse analysis, the study shows how longstanding narratives- especially “tragedy of the commons” framings- retain authority even where there is little empirical evidence of widespread degradation, and where rainfall-driven, non-equilibrium dynamics are emphasised instead. The endurance of these narratives produces a misfit between evidence and interventions, shaping practices such as grazing restrictions, conservation zoning, and restoration initiatives- often with profound justice implications. Using epistemic justice theory (Fricker, 2017; Fraser, 2005), the analysis illustrates how degradation debates function as sites where knowledge hierarchies shape cultural, material and political injustices. It demonstrates how dominant epistemic practices privilege particular scientific models while marginalising pastoralists’ knowledge- grounded in mobility, drought response, and fine-grained landscape assessment that frequently challenges equilibrium-based assumptions but remains undervalued in policy arenas. The research also highlights promising interdisciplinary approaches that centre herders’ knowledge, contextualise degradation within complex environmental and social histories, and make uncertainties explicit. The epistemic justice lens offers new perspectives on why degradation narratives endure and what is needed for more inclusive rangeland science and conservation. This contribution speaks directly to the panels focus on the “big stories” guiding land-use interventions and emerging counter-narratives.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation uses analyses of from research in South Africa to demonstrate how community-led approaches to Nature-based Solutions (NbS) grapple with attempts to restore degraded communal landscapes and enhance ecological resilience through collective action.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation uses analyses of from research in South Africa to demonstrate how community-led approaches to Nature-based Solutions (NbS) grapple with attempts to restore degraded communal landscapes and enhance ecological resilience through collective action. The NbS model we examine incorporates carbon payments as an incentive for sustainable practices that include rotational grazing and preventing veld fires, thereby represents a modern, market-linked approach to communal rangeland management. This model motivates collective action and provides tangible benefits that reconfigure local governance arrangements. Partnership with external actors places emphasis on working closely with local communities to train and empower them with rangeland management skills and integrating traditional ecological knowledge with modern scientific approaches to achieve sustainable land use. We examine the efficacy of care, reciprocity and sharing in fostering pathways to improved rangelands, livestock health and human wellbeing.