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.