Competing Place Meanings in Complex Landscapes: A Social–Ecological Approach to Unpacking Community Conservation Outcomes on the Wild Coast, South Africa

ABSTRACT

Despite a general awareness of the social–ecological complexities within which conservation interventions are embedded, approaches to understanding a diversity of local perspectives of heterogeneous landscapes and how they matter for the outcomes of these interventions are seldom demonstrated. We apply a social–ecological approach to exploring the multiple place meanings related to key landscape elements around a proposed community conservation intervention on the Wild Coast, South Africa, by identifying and analyzing three narratives about this impending change. These narratives mobilize competing meanings of the landscape to argue for or against the conservation project. By linking place meanings to locally defined landscape units (ecotopes), we engage multiple interpretations of the heterogeneous and changing landscape to gain a holistic and more inclusive picture of social–ecological landscape processes such as increasing woodlands and field abandonment. The obstruction of this particular intervention indicates the importance of engaging with multiple cultural values of nature.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-based conservation
• cultural values
• development
• Eastern Cape
• ecotope
• sense of place
• Transkei

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the participants in the study for their generous hospitality and willingness to contribute to the research as well as assistance in the field from Faith Mabusela, Mlungisile Mbili and Gavin Masterson. We thank Erik Andersson, Caroline Schill, Maike Hamann, Andrew Merrie, Julie Goodness, and three anonymous reviewers who provided constructive comments that helped to improve the manuscript. The research was funded by a grant for development research from the Swedish Science Council (VR 2014-3394).

Notes

Names of the villages, provincial authorities, and the project are omitted to protect the anonymity of informants.

In interviews with non-local stakeholders in English, interviewees referred to broader landscape categories (e.g., grassland). In subsequent investigation, we chose to use the isiXhosa words for these ecotopes as this was the more common language in the area, and because the isiXhosa classification offered the opportunity to describe meanings and landscape processes at a finer scale.

There were a few instances when an individual expressed a place meaning that was at odds with their narrative about the project. These meanings are not presented here, but such tensions are analyzed in a forthcoming paper.

Betterment planning refers to the Apartheid government’s 1960s villagization project that relocated Black South Africans from dispersed homesteads to village areas and demarcated arable land and grazing camps, within the former homeland areas.