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.