Format/Structure

Focusing on rangeland and grassland NbS interventions in Southern Africa, this panel brings together research and stories from frictional spaces and ecologies of 'nature-based' restoration and repair.

Long Abstract

Interest in so-called ‘Nature-based Solutions’ (NbS) has surged in recent years, framed by powerful organisations as the new panacea for reducing disaster risk, mitigating climate change and building climate resilience, enhancing biodiversity and addressing human development needs in integrated ways. But, beyond integrating existing ecosystem-based approaches to achieve multiple simultaneous goals, what NbS means – in concept and in practice – is contested across and within disciplines, practitioner and policy spaces, and, crucially in dynamic intervention landscapes. What ‘nature’ do we mean? Solutions to what problems, through whose labours, and for whose benefit? Restoration of what and to which ends?

With a focus on the politics around nature-based intervention in Southern African rangelands, this session aims to bring together stories from frictional spaces and emerging ecologies of ‘restoration’ and ‘repair’. As such, the convenors invite contributions to ‘research storytelling’ and welcome both creative and conventional presentation formats. We welcome expressions of interest focusing on diverse rangeland ecologies and nature-based intervention settings from throughout the Southern Africa region. From approaches like ‘Herding for Health’ to fire prohibition, efforts to curtail zoonotic disease transmission to tree planting and afforestation landscapes to value chain approaches, we are interested in linking high level framings and frameworks to experiences from such places and spaces.

Contribution may engage questions such as whether and how combinations of techniques and technologies (long-existing and novel) associated with various aspects of NbS interact with sedimented histories of intervention, self-organised and communal governance arrangements; place-based struggles around land, labour, subsistence; plural values in nature and place; and the social and ecological legacies such as of colonial, apartheid, and neoliberal social and agricultural policies.

What ‘big’ stories – myths, received wisdoms, dogmas, value constructs – are shaping the global imaginaries, national policy fields and the lived terrain of nature-based intervention across the region, and what counter-narratives and contrasting imaginaries are emerging on the ground in a time of intensifying change, accelerating enclosures and multiplying uncertainties? What are the circulating stories from farmers and pastoralists, ecologists, politicians, and others about things like degradation and ecological change, markets and value, carbon and other intervention technologies, human-nature relationships and ‘solutions’?

What do these stories and dynamics mean for re-thinking notions like equilibrium and resilience, scale, sustainability, nature and development?

This Panel has 4 pending paper proposals.
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