Futures consciousness and governance transitions for climate adaptation in South African protected areas

ABSTRACT

In the context of climate change, protected areas play an important role in implementing the Sustainable Development Goals and addressing resource nexus challenges. However, setting protected areas for long-term conservation is often criticised for using narratives based on political, economic, and scientific assumptions to justify which elements of nature should be conserved and what actions should be implemented, creating a sense that conservation outcomes are desirable and universally accepted. Such narratives exclude other voices, values, and practices, limiting alternative options for the future. Adapting protected areas to climate change requires innovative approaches to address societal challenges and critically examining conservation strategies to make informed decisions under scenarios of change. This article presents the case of the Garden Route National Park in South Africa and the approach used to co-create inclusive visions of the future with local stakeholders. I draw on theoretical insights and empirical data collected through interviews with the park staff to describe the use of futures consciousness as an approach to understanding how people perceive change, prepare for, and embrace the future. I explore how people’s perceptions of change mobilize action to address complex problems and create alternative imaginaries beyond spatial and temporal boundaries. Futures consciousness can contribute to understanding processes that enable or constrain transformation and identifying options for mobilising change towards desired future goals. The findings can help managers examine individual and collective assumptions about adaptation, inform future-oriented practices and advance opportunities for transformational change to build resilient, just futures for nature and people.

EDITED BY:

• Nadia Sitas

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change adaptation
• futures consciousness
• protected areas
• reflexivity
• sustainable development
• transformative change

1. Introduction

Protected areas are a common approach to conservation practice around the world (Maxwell et al. 2020) representing social-ecological systems (SES), with complex interactions across temporal and spatial scales (Cumming et al. 2015). By 2021, about 17% of global land and inland waters were protected (UNEP-WCMC and IUCN, 2020), with plans to extend this to a goal of 30% (SCBD 2022). With direct links to 12 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) (Dudley et al. 2017), protected areas can potentially integrate and contribute to meet the SDG at local level and across scales, making the case for more interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral research and management beyond the traditional focus on just protecting biodiversity.

Protected areas are often contested despite being a preferred tool for biodiversity conservation. I examine protected areas from the perspective of enclosures, specifically temporal enclosures. Enclosures refer to modern political processes that shape and manipulate geographies to appropriate land and exercise control of resources, redefining rights to access and decision-making through time (Vasudevan et al. 2008; Jeffrey et al. 2012). Creating these enclosures entails practices of control, legitimised by narratives that justify exclusions, dispossessions, and activities for private or state use and benefit (Fairbanks et al. 2018). ‘Temporal enclosures’ was a term proposed by Jaramillo and Carmona (2022) to explain the result of political processes that secure control over land use, access, and managed resources and restrict other stakeholders’ options for planning, imagining, or creating alternative futures to those that favour the original purpose for creating the enclosure. Temporal enclosures have been studied in resource extraction contexts to describe how coal mining narratives create temporal and spatial dispossessions affecting people’s ability to plan, predict, and build futures, legitimising some actors over others (Jaramillo and Carmona 2022).

Protected areas are temporal enclosures, legally defined by states and justified by prevailing conservation narratives. The justification for maintaining enclosures for conservation originates from various perspectives, including political and economic factors and scientific ideas about which aspects of nature should be preserved (Wakild, 2018), limiting actions, decision-making, participation, and future possibilities. As a temporal enclosure, protected areas reconstruct a collective understanding of values, predefining outcomes and creating a perception that the future is manageable, under narratives that present future actions as inevitable and desirable (Jaramillo and Carmona 2022), in this case creating narratives aiming to conserve biodiversity in the long term.

Global change is challenging such narratives. Climate change is already affecting ecosystems’ functionality and the supply of ecosystem services (IPCC 2022) and nature’s contributions to adaptation in the future (Colloff et al. 2020). Adaptation to climate change in protected areas requires an assessment of the potential impacts of ecological transformation across temporal and spatial scales to make informed decisions about responses to future scenarios. Future-oriented approaches have been proposed to transform environmental governance strategies under scenarios of change (Wyborn et al. 2016; van Kerkhoff et al. 2019; Pereira et al. 2021). Exploring options for the future and deciding on actions to achieve preferred visions requires a reflexive step to rethink existing assumptions about conservation goals under global change.

One way to promote reflexivity in adaptation for conservation is through exploring future consciousness. The concept of future consciousness has its roots in futures studies and is described as a shared capacity to be aware of the consequences of present actions in the future (Sharpe et al. 2016). Future consciousness allows examining the future as an internalised and relational phenomenon to understand whether individuals or institutions accept or question established assumptions (Ahvenharju et al. 2018). Sanna Ahvenharju et al. produced a five-dimensional model to facilitate an understanding of how people prepare for, and embrace the future (2018); all five dimensions are relevant to adaptation (Nalau and Cobb 2022). In this article, I follow Ahvenharju et al. definition of futures consciousness as ‘the human capacity to understand, anticipate, prepare, and embrace the future’ (2021) to explore how individuals think and act about adaptation to strengthen reflexivity in protected areas governance.

In studying how protected area managers understand, communicate, and implement adaptation to climate change in practice, I apply a relational approach to take ‘ordinary experience seriously’ and identify individual acts of consciousness (Wagenaar 2007). Drawing from theoretical insights and empirical findings from interviews performed in the Garden Route National Park in South Africa, I discuss how individuals’ perceptions about change mobilize desires and action to address complex problems and the creation of alternative imaginaries beyond existing temporal enclosures. Imaginaries refer to socio-political visions of desirable futures determining policy outcomes and actions (Jasanoff and Kim 2009).

The analysis draws from futures consciousness (Ahvenharju et al. 2018) and theoretical perspectives of social change (Sztompka 1993; Feola 2015) to provide a dialogical understanding of managing conservation-based areas under climate change, exploring assumptions about change and expectations for the future to identify options to change maladaptive practices. The findings demonstrate the relevance of futures consciousness for mobilising collective change towards desired future goals to inform collective processes of adaptation and transformation.

2. Conceptual approach and methods

Although protected areas imply aspirations for the long-term conservation of biodiversity, management strategies are often short-term, creating a disconnect between management actions and ecological response time. This temporal disconnection provides an opportunity to explore future orientation about biodiversity conservation and to what degree climate change challenges long-term conservation goals. To understand preferences for preparing and responding to climate impacts on biodiversity conservation, I adapted the Five Dimensions of Futures Consciousness (hereafter 5DFC; Ahvenharju et al. 2018, 2021) as explained in the next section.

2.1. Futures consciousness

The 5DFC is used here to understand individual and collective motivations shaping conservation planning and management actions in protected areas, what processes enable or constrain transformative change towards desired goals, and how they prepare for and embrace the future. Futures consciousness considers elements of social psychology to study how individual cognitive basis is affected by social interactions, therefore influencing a sense of self, of belonging, and its role in defining collective futures (Ahvenharju et al. 2021). The 5DFC are: 1) time perspective: having a long-term outlook to understand and connect across temporal scales; 2) agency beliefs: perceived ability and confidence to influence and change current realities; 3) openness to alternatives: the capacity to imagine, explore, and think critically about options for transformation instead of sticking to plans; 4) systems perception: the comprehension of interconnected social and natural systems and the consequences of decisions across spatiotemporal scales; 5) concern for others: the values, moral, and ethical underpinnings of a better future for current and subsequent generations (Ahvenharju et al. 2018). These are not discrete dimensions, and it is essential to consider the relations between them.

As explained by Jaramillo and Carmona (2022, p. 14), a temporal enclosure is shaped by ‘future-oriented affects – wistfulness, hope and anxiety, which lead actors to act in the present to secure (or prevent) imaginations of the future’ with some actors determining future actions and goals. Addressing temporal characteristics helps to understand the role of futures consciousness in opening options in protected areas’ temporal enclosures. The time perspective allows critical examination of the temporal contexts in which people operate, assigning timeframes to events or the solutions to respond to such events and managing the environment (MacKenzie 2021). For example, protected areas management approaches often manipulate spatial and temporal characteristics into simplified timeframes (calendar times), reducing options for alternative trajectories (Massey 2001). A temporal perspective helps to understand the relational, experiential, and embodied practices over time while recognising the pace of ecosystem processes, their responses to change, and the inherent tensions with clock and calendar times in specific spatial settings (Adam 1998, p. 10).

Time helps human societies, individuals, and institutions to measure and locate themselves in relation to events. It can influence our understanding of change and systems’ responses to it (Kolinjivadi et al. 2019). Social change depends on social contexts of stability, inertia, incremental, and dramatic social change (de la Sablonnière 2017), which are related to the pace of change (a temporal characteristic) leading a system into different states. Processes of change through rapid or slow onset events can have diverse implications for the identities and attributes of socio-ecological systems and adaptation responses to change. Addressing temporal perspectives involved in decision-making can facilitate understanding how social-ecological responses to climate events unfold and determine the implications across temporal and spatial scales of adaptation (Adamson et al. 2018).

2.2. Futures consciousness and options for transformative change

Adaptation is about actions responding to observed changes and foreseeing and preparing for future changes. In anticipating climate-related ecological transformations, the temporal perspective provided by the 5DFC helps to move beyond the once-upon-a time (past-present orientation) to focus on the future. Memory has an important role in anticipation, understanding memory as the evolutionary function that helps learn from past decisions to understand current trends and plan for the future (Cilliers 2006; Klein 2013). The future orientation invites a proactive approach to identify actions to transform the governance of complex SES towards uncertain futures (Muiderman et al. 2020; Rutting et al. 2022). Transformative governance can support the difficult task of mobilizing change in governance systems to respond to and accommodate social-ecological transformations while acknowledging the inherent political processes involved across scales, sectors, and actors (Chaffin et al. 2016; Wyborn et al. 2019). A transitions approach helps to identify entry points for transforming institutions, rules, and practices (Chaffin et al. 2016), reframing problems, and envisioning alternative options through learning and participation (Loorbach et al. 2017).

Addressing climate change impacts in protected areas challenges assumptions about long-term conservation in static borders. Reframing conservation strategies to address climate change can be enabled by identifying where people and institutions are now. In response to this challenge, van Kerkhoff et al. (2019) proposed four transitions to explore approaches to adaptation and identify options to transform governance systems in protected areas: i) accepting ecological change as a normal part of management rather than resisting it; (ii) more focus on benefits the park provides to people and nature, not just on ecological attributes; (iii) acknowledging adaptation as a governance problem, not just as a scientific-technical one; and (iv) moving from reactive, problem-solving to ongoing learning and proactive practice. Understanding which futures consciousness attributes are guiding decisions to manage complex systems can help evaluate if governance systems are ready to include climate adaptation as part of management and identify entry points to enable necessary transitions. The 5DFC is used here to indicate such entry points in the context of the above four transitions.

2.3. Relationality in social ecological systems

The narratives framing protected areas and conservation practices can be influenced by emotional affects and the frames of reference used to understand nature, influencing options for the future in conservation agendas (Múnera-Roldán et al. 2022). Relational approaches can help understand the intrinsic, co-producing human-nature processes (Jasanoff 2004; West et al. 2020), including institutional processes to govern nature (Wyborn 2015) or the principles and actions guiding how people interact with nature and with each other (Pramova et al. 2021). Relationality allows understanding of how multiple meanings assigned to social-ecological systems, the relations therein, and how the interpretations and expectations about adaptation mobilise action (Lejano 2019). Given their role in implementing rules and making individual choices in a collective setting governed by laws and management guides, protected area managers embody both institutional and human relational perspectives in their everyday practice. This provides an opportunity to understand elements of futures consciousness in decision-making processes.

2.4. Case study

This paper is part of a larger project across three countries (Munera-Roldan et al. in review). Here I focus on the interviews held in Garden Route National Park (GRNP) to identify futures consciousness attributes involved in managing the park and negotiating a collective vision and management objectives for the park (Box 1).

Box 1. Garden Route National Park: vision, goals, and management programs.

- Collective vision: An innovative and accessible national park, spanning mountains to marine, conserving the natural and cultural heritage of the Garden Route collaboratively for the benefit of people and the environment.- Goal: conserve the diverse ecosystems of the Garden Route on a landscape level- High-level objectives guiding management programs: natural heritage (conserve terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems through adaptive, collaborative, and innovative approaches), cultural heritage (preserve, interpret, and present the diverse cultural heritage through allowing access, engagement, responsible utilisation and research), responsible tourism (nature- and culture-based opportunities), equitable access and benefit sharing, participative engagement, learning, interpretation research and monitoring (promote up-to-date knowledge and awareness to biodiversity and cultural heritage), and good governance.- Extracted from SANParks (2020) Garden Route National Park Management Plan

Parks in South Africa initially focused on protecting game populations during the apartheid era, with profound effects on society and environmental management. Under apartheid, nature was to be controlled and managed in game reserves owned by Whites, while Blacks were dispossessed of their traditional lands and became labourers on reserves, farms and in mines (Thakholi 2021). Those game reserves set the basis for the South African National Parks (SANParks) reserve system. SANParks is the national agency managing and planning protected areas in South Africa, under the corporate vision of achieving ‘a world-class system of national parks re-connecting and inspiring society’ (SANParks 2020).

Located on the southern coastline of South Africa across Eastern Cape and Western Cape provinces, the GRNP is a fragmented matrix of landscapes covering mountains, forests, lakes, estuaries, coastal and marine ecosystems, agricultural lands, and urban areas. The park was created by merging three protected areas (Wilderness, Knysna, and Tsitsikamma) and is one of the few open parks (unfenced) in South Africa. This complex of ecosystems is managed as a single unit by SANParks. GRNP is home to a rich biodiversity and unique ecosystems. Portions of the park include a Ramsar site (Wilderness Lakes) supporting some of the most significant waterbird assemblages in South Africa (Russell et al. 2014). The diverse landscapes and land uses explain the complex and diverse stakeholder relations and cooperative governance arrangements. Approximately 60% of GRNP overlaps with South Africa’s Strategic Water Source Areas, with 28.8% protected in the GRNP (Nel et al. 2017). Many of the rivers in the area has been designated as a Freshwater Ecosystem Priority Area (Nel et al. 2016). Climate change has been identified as the most significant emerging challenge for the park, and extreme events such as flooding, storm surges and fires are expected to increase (van Wilgen and Herbst 2017).

The social context of the park is diverse and contrasting. According to the management plan (SANParks 2020), no active land claims exist in the GRNP. Still, poverty levels are high in the region, with informal settlements around the urban and suburban centres (Roux et al. 2021). In Eastern Cape and Western Cape provinces unemployment rates are 47% and 25.8%, respectively (StatsSA 2021). The coastal landscape has been modified by an increase in private properties and public infrastructure (Guerbois et al. 2019). Due to the park’s designation in 2009, tourism is an important economic activity, and some the park programmes aim to alleviate poverty and enhance socio-economic development.

SANParks management approach acknowledges systems complexity and associated uncertainty (Freitag et al. 2014; SANParks 2020), and long-term monitoring is implemented in almost all its parks. Strategic Adaptive Management (SAM), a form of adaptive management historically developed and implemented by SANParks for over 20 years (Freitag et al. 2014; Roux et al. 2022), promotes co-creating a vision to define management objectives, monitoring, evaluation, and learning. Management of protected areas is supported by collaborative knowledge-based structures where scientists and managers interact constantly (Roux et al. 2019). GRNP is implementing participatory processes to define the collective vision and integrate local perspectives and aspirations for the future (Roux et al. 2021).

The complex land use matrix and social context of the park, alongside the SAM applied by SANParks provided an opportunity to explore the challenges of addressing climate change in an already adaptive management system.

2.5. Methods

Empirical data was collected through 16 semi-structured interviews¹ with SANParks managers and scientists working in GRNP and participant observation over four weeks of fieldwork during February-March 2020. Adopting a qualitative, dialogical approach, I examined attributes of futures consciousness from narratives shared by interviewees in the GRNP. The interview process is a dialogical exercise where the interviewer and interviewee create a story through dialogue to extract personal narratives (Tanggaard 2009). As a distinct mode of knowing, narratives are used here to understand the context and capture ‘learning from practice’ stories (Wagenaar 2011). The results presented here focus on the rich dialogues held throughout the interviews, where participants were invited to share their stories, experience, feelings, and aspirations towards managing protected areas under climate change. The dialogical approach helps to give voice to how interviewees describe and understand the problem of adapting protected areas to climate change, their actions in response to it, and their expectations for the future (Tanggaard 2009; Wagenaar 2011).

The interviews focused on understanding how managers conceptualise climate adaptation and their expectations for the future. The questions covered the limitations of long-term conservation under the limited geographic boundaries of protected areas to elicit their perceptions about how climate change might affect decision-making, expected outcomes of adaptation, and what innovations or actions can facilitate conservation under climate change scenarios. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. The transcripts were coded using NVivo 12 (QSR 2020), applying primarily deductive coding focusing on 5DFC themes (time perspective, agency beliefs, openness to alternatives, systems perception, and concern for others) regarding climate change and management, and inductive coding helped to capture emergent issues involved in defining adaptation. The management plan (SANParks 2020) was also imported to NVivo and analysed alongside the interviews.

This project was approved by the Australian National University Human Research Ethics Committee 2019/226. Written consent for the interviews was obtained, and quotes are presented without attribution (Int. #).

3. Results

Somebody asked what does it feels like to be a park manager? I said, it is like having a baby, you are all the times looking [to see] if the baby is hungry, or the baby is tired … or safe; you are all the time worried about the baby. (Int. 17)

The ‘baby’ metaphor used by this interviewee summarizes the relational aspects involved in making decisions for managing a state-owned protected area, encompassing futures consciousness dimensions: agency, time perspective, and issues of care and responsibility.

In their daily actions, scientists and managers in GRNP face and reflect on the challenges of decoupling the social from the ecological, the individual from the collective, the epistemological from the ontological, or singular events from processes that happen over time. The interviews aimed to understand their role in the park, their challenges, existing opportunities, and their expectations for the future under the possible transformational effects of climate change. When asked to define from their perspective what climate adaptation is, a common answer was: I don’t know; some of them admitted it was the first time they had thought about climate adaptation in relation to their roles. But as the conversation continued, I could collate a general understanding that adaptation for them is about dealing with new conditions and accepting that change is happening, as observed by impacts on infrastructure, ecosystems, and livelihoods. Some respondents pointed out the need to reduce vulnerabilities, learn from past experiences, avoid resisting change, and create space for nature. Others questioned how to conserve and adapt dynamic systems inside static borders.

SANParks aims for the long-term conservation of natural resources. Management plans are upgraded every 10 years, defining how SES elements will be managed under programs and strategies that respond to specific objectives. Dividing the system features for management helps simplify the complex SES and interactions therein, but it leads to conflicts between ecological processes vs. management times. Considering SAM approaches, interviewees mentioned existing challenges to updating monitoring systems related to narrow management times, which are a barrier to understanding systems responses to change and adapting research questions and management responses in the complex social-ecological context of the park. Reconciling SAM approaches with rigid administrative structures that focus on outcomes rather than processes challenges proactive decision-making in the face of uncertain global change:

The other reason or potential hindrance towards good [strategic] adaptive management in San Parks, is differences in timescales, ecological processes happening at different time scales to what our [planning] processes are happening, even talking down to financial processes that can sometimes be extremely frustrating and slow to work out, to policy timeframes or management plan timeframes. (Int. 13)

There is also a perception that the character of the park – what makes the place special – can vary through time and depends on subjective observations and values, making it harder to reconcile different perceptions of conservation outcomes through time with management timeframes:

[There are] more ecosystem processes that are breaking down. More environmental services that are not being realised. [There] comes a time when it just all falls apart. And we just blunder on, often, as a society. How you communicate that to short-term thinking where you’ve got to have long-term visions – our national parks visions are long term. (Int. 12)

Interviewees acknowledge climate change as a threat to the park. However, they are questioning how much of the observed changes are the consequence of anthropogenic climate change or if the system would naturally adjust and, therefore, to what degree climate change should be addressed through a management plan. Their preferred adaptation option is to observe how systems respond to drivers of change and learn from past experiences to update future actions instead of flagging specific adaptation actions in the management plan. But the potential cascading effects of climate change transcend spatial and temporal scales. Managers are examining how to rethink actions while maintaining efforts toward higher-order goals and the challenge of incorporating longer horizons into planning, even under high uncertainty. The quote below reflects the disconnect between perceptions of climate change, the fragmented responses to it, and the challenges of balancing different temporal orientations in management:

[Climate change] is a long-term thing, you can’t just throw a quick thing now, if you’re not planning now for then it’s going to hit you … it’s one of those big, overwhelming drivers of change for most people. They see it happening when it’s drought or fire, even though that’s not always even climate change, but part of natural variability. I think we allow them to think that because it makes it more real and tangible. Because [we] don’t conceptualise longer term, the future that might be very different, it seems that as humans we struggle with it. (Int. 15)

However, current responses to climate change are mainly reactive. But interviewees are assessing management responses and their implications across temporal and spatial scales. Implementing climate adaptation in the enclosed spatial and temporal boundaries of a national park raises questions about what, where, and how conservation actions can support future adaptation options:

Conservation is not staying static … [conservation] has to be outside of protected areas. And climate change adaptation can’t be in protected areas. It’s much bigger. Maybe through sort of like stewardship approaches, buffer zones creating corridors, and engagement with the different land holders. (Int. 13)

Respondents question the inherent contradictions of managing ecological processes under human-defined boundaries, reflecting on reconciling different perceptions about the speed of change in defining management actions and implications for adaptation. When prompted to define adaptation, one participant reflected on the consequences of managing estuary systems in GRNP where seasonal water variability is increasingly affected by extreme events, and their concerns about potential effects of breaching estuaries:

We’ve gone through these periods of marine dominated and freshwater dominated. So that isn’t the problem. The problem is that it’s happening so fast that we probably find the environment is going to struggle to adapt. We as humans are certainly going to struggle to adapt and change. And when people’s properties start to get flooded, then the sort of pressures are to sit and try and prevent it, and the ways in which you can prevent it aren’t necessarily always going to be good environmental decisions. (Int. 12)

Interview responses indicate mixed feelings about anticipating climate impacts and implementing adaptation actions in response to surprise events. On the one hand, individuals feel encouraged by their capacity to effectively respond to such situations, as was the case in responding to outbreaks of animal diseases in the past. A participant explained that despite the unexpected event, they could think and act outside existing rules to have a sense of control. But as mentioned above, when responding to the effects of climate change under current management times and planning for distant events under conditions of uncertainty, there are feelings of helplessness in part related to rigid governance structures:

One of the things that could contribute to climate change adaptation is having a less onerous governance system that allows the agility to deal with these things…just having the institutional agility and ability to react to these things quicker, because it’s quite frustrating when you work on the ground and then it just takes forever. (Int. 17)

On the other hand, adapting to climate change is facing a conceptual critique about how much management must deal with uncertain climate change. The tension between actively preventing or living with change is part of current discussions. I noted such tensions during the interviews and when attending meetings (as an observer) with managers or scientists. Participants mentioned the role of the SAM methodological framework in observing systems responses, promoting learning and reflexivity, which, at least in theory, encourages avoiding reactive responses. Despite the inherent conceptual and practical tensions, addressing climate change is becoming part of an institutional rethinking of management, and participants are trying to reconcile the novel idea of climate adaptation as part of managing complex systems as illustrated by these quotes:

It was difficult for us to write a section into our management plan about climate change…We’ve spoken [about] things like extreme weather events, fire, storm surges, coastal erosion. Some of those things that came up yesterday in the discussion is something that’s starting to come through (Int. 5)

The challenge for us will be, how do we actually translate that laboratory process [climate change] into real learning on the ground with stakeholders, and how do we pull it together into a more cohesive whole and stand back from it and reflect on the whole, because there’s lots of that happening in small pockets around different things. (Int 15)

Interview responses reveal preferences for ecosystem-based approaches over practices supporting adaptation at the species level, suggesting strong systems perception to facilitate SES adaptation in and beyond the parks’ boundaries as the means to enable ecosystems functionality and reconcile sustainability goals across scales and for society:

The reliance’s and dependencies on nature for various services would shift with climate change, and how are we thinking about putting in place a resilient system to buffer the impacts we’re going to experience from climate change. There’s been a kind of central part of our narrative in making the case for ecological sustainability for a long time. That’s in the policy space … trying to get policymakers and government departments to really think about nature playing a role in facilitating a more robust future in the face of climate change. (Int 20)

Social justice represents an aspirational goal for adaptation in the park. The participatory approach for co-creating a desired vision for the management plan is an example of collective agency expressed through relational practices and duties of care, allowing reflection on options to overcome past colonial legacies to address sustainability and environmental justice while opening opportunities to imagine alternative futures:

SANParks vision of reconnectors with [local knowledge and sustainability] that’s actually very powerful if the people understand exactly what it means … we want to get to a point where people used to be before, how they used to interact with the natural environment. I can tell you that we did not have to dig for gold in this continent … we were just depending on the nature of the system, purely, and people’s interaction to the natural system was seamless. My dream would be to get to a point where we are, once again, like that and not for one group to see the other group as inferior and not knowing what they’re doing. (Int. 16)

Examples of learning and reflexivity from the interviewees included documenting and observing ecological processes and responses and not taking scientific observations for granted. Managers have learned from unexpected adverse events, such as the example above about animal disease outbreaks. They are open to trying new options, as illustrated by the case of the Knysna Seahorse (Hippocampus capensis), an endangered species restricted to some bays on the south coast of South Africa, which is reported to prefer artificial (rock mattresses) to natural habitat in the Knysna Estuary. The seahorse case enabled a rethinking of conservation actions considering the urban context of the park, as this respondent explained:

The gabion baskets in the marinas have actually been good for the seahorse population, they use them as habitat and so it’s actually increased their habitat instead of what we thought, that its bad and transformed. It’s a man-made structure but in fact, it actually was good for that population of critically endangered Knysna seahorses. (Int. 9)

In reflecting on their expectations for the future, respondents are questioning the unintentional effect of SAM on simplifying complex systems for management, considering the multiple ways systems respond to change and potential impacts on the park’s goals. But respondents also envision opportunities for regional adaptation, collaboration, and learning:

I would see the role the Garden Route, as being critical at a regional level, to provide resilience and opportunities for adaptation … we’re in a very constrained area, but we pretty much cover the whole area between the mountain and the sea. We have strong relationships with people, there’s a willingness and openness to learn and experiment and, to some measure adapt. (Int. 15)

Addressing climate change is not part of the collective vision of the GRNP but is addressed as a separate program in the management plan. Existing management actions contributing to adaptation include landscape approaches, restoration, and measures to maintain functional ecosystems, not just single system attributes. Although management actions are not identified as climate change adaptation in the management plan, respondents acknowledged that such actions could contribute to national efforts to address climate change adaptation. Participants provided examples from their experience of using landscape approaches to negotiate different stakeholders’ needs and interpretations of change (e.g. elephant management in other parks) and the importance of building a long-term relationship with local stakeholders.

Some adaptation challenges include potential high costs to relocate tourism infrastructure already affected by extreme weather events. But a compelling and immediate challenge, is balancing the sense of responsibility towards protecting natural resources and allowing local impoverished communities to benefit from the park, especially if climate change can affect such benefits. Then, setting conservation areas as an adaptation option opens questions about balancing benefits for society with conservation goals:

It’s sort of a conflicting thing too because there’s so many people in the landscape and they have requirements and needs. There’s continuous pressure on these protected areas to provide resources, otherwise, they’re not seen as being valuable enough. We might say protected areas are great in terms of climate change, and that whole argument, but at the same time, we need to provide a growing population with resources, so that protected area automatically come under discussion and threat … if they’re not being utilised by the people for the people, then why do we have them? (Int. 5)

Despite the systemic approach by SANParks for managing national parks, climate change reinforces linear perceptions of causality, as observed by how some respondents try to understand the problem and break the system down into constituent parts. An interesting case presented during the interviews was about ensuring the well-being of a non-human individual: the Knysna elephant, believed to be the last individual of the local population (Moolman et al. 2019). What to do with this individual has been central to discussions between GRNP staff and stakeholders, evaluating potential animal-human interactions in an unfenced park. At the same time, management options for this individual are helping to reconsider climate adaptation as they assess if the elephant’s movements are related to seasonal changes in temperature. Decisions about what the park can do with one individual animal demonstrate a complex approach, bringing issues of ethics, morals, and care for human and non-human agents to avoid human-animals conflicts in a park with no fences.

4. Discussion

Why does futures consciousness matter in adaptation and future-oriented approaches? The ideas and expectations about adaptation shared by interviewees uncover some of the conceptual and practical challenges that individuals and institutions face in realising options for the future. Exploring futures consciousness can encourage practitioners and scientists to critically examine existing assumptions about change and current practices, while unpacking potential contradictions between individual and collective aspirations about the future.

Adaptation can be through transformative or incremental actions to accommodate or direct changes or measures to resist change (Peterson St-Laurent et al. 2021; Schuurman et al. 2021). Defining which adaptation type best suits conservation practice can be influenced by perceptions of time and systems and the degree of beliefs towards transformation or maintaining the status quo (Múnera-Roldán et al. 2022). In this article, I address the reflexive step mentioned in the introduction: to facilitate transitions towards future-oriented approaches to accommodate future, uncertain ecological transformations in management. The 5DFC framework brings out the conceptual and practical challenges that individuals and institutions face in defining options for the future. As discussed below, the findings suggest that existing futures consciousness elements can enable transitions toward future-oriented approaches.

4.1. Futures consciousness and transitions

Despite addressing climate change not being part of the collective vision of the GRNP (Box 1), I documented transitions in thinking about climate change and its implications for managing the park. According to the future-orientated transitions described by (van Kerkhoff et al. 2019), the GRNP staff have engaged in different levels of future-oriented practices, and they are already well advanced in some of the transitions. Responses from the interviews indicate they are thinking about future consequences of management actions and climate change for managing the park, despite some of them not explicitly thinking about it as adaptation. However, climate adaptation remains implemented as incremental changes in management. Different futures consciousness attributes can explain the different engagement in future-oriented practices and transitions (Table 1). I explain some inherent contradictions across the dimensions of futures consciousness and adaptation choices in the park to explain how the transitions are happening.

Table 1. Unpacking the five dimensions of futures consciousness (central column, Ahvenharju et al. 2018) enabling the transitions (left column, van Kerkhoff et al., 2019) for transformative change in the Garden Route National park (GRNP), South Africa. The quotes in the right column are selected illustrative quotes from the interviews.

Transition	Futures consciousness dimensions	Illustrative quote
From preventing change and reducing uncertainty, to anticipate and embrace change and accept uncertainty	Systems perception: understand social-ecological system processes, responses, and feedback across space and time	Do we fight it? Or do we live with it? Probably a bit of both. We try and prevent it obviously as much as you can, but there are going to be radical changes that are beyond our control (Int. 12)
	Time perspective: to address management timeframes while observing, understanding, and anticipating the system
	Agency beliefs: feeling able to respond to unexpected events, through incremental or transformative actions
	Openness to alternatives: embracing change require being flexible and spontaneous when faced to different alternatives and pace of change (rapid or slow)
(2) From approaches focusing on some ecological features to social values and benefits	Concern for others: a shift from ecological to social values calls to reflect on issues of ethics, care and responsibility towards human, and relations with non-human agents	Climate change is not just going to impact fish stocks, it’s going to impact the people that are utilising those fish stocks and how they change their behaviour might change the fish stocks even more. We need to think beyond just the depth our parks for the corridors and the movement of animals, to think about how it’s going to be influencing those [SES] systems all together (Int. 13)
	Systems perception: having systemic and holistic approaches helps to consider complex societal problems and implications of solutions across scales
	Openness to alternatives: rethinking existing assumptions about conservation goals
(3) From adaptation as a scientific/technical issue, to adaptation as governance	Agency beliefs: organising strategies and rules to better respond to future changes	That means working with stakeholders, and seeing we as part of a mosaic landscape, not as a park that’s separate from the landscape. And how do we allow these bigger processes across multiple land uses and multiple land tenure or ownership (Int. 15)
	Openness to alternatives: questioning how science informs planning and decision-making, to rearticulate knowledge systems and governance
	Systems perception: addressing participation of different governance models across scales and sectors
	Concern for others: negotiate and reconcile power imbalances between different stakeholders
(4) From reactive problem solving, to learning and reflexive approaches	Agency beliefs: understanding and shaping future events through learning, rethinking, and envisioning	The GRNP is a very fragmented and open access park. So, there’s a lot of land uses in between pockets of the park [it makes] more important to have stakeholder participation because people are so influenced by the park, and they influence the park so much (Int. 14)
	Time perspective: anticipating future changes while ‘keeping an eye’ on the present, learning from past events, and being aware of events and consequences through time
	Systems perception: learning through relational engagement with SES to rearticulate management
	Concern for others: participation as a transformative process through engaging stakeholders with diverse ways of knowing, doing, and values to address complexity and long-term change

The long-term approaches and systems perception observed in GRNP encourages participants to perceive change as inherent to complex systems. This temporal awareness is part of an imagined logic to understand systems dynamics and responses to change. Time perspective, realised through long-term monitoring, implies careful observation of SES responses to drivers of change through time, enabling transitions one, two, and four. However, addressing climate change is another story. In GRNP, the contestation between aspirations for long-term thinking and calendar management times constrains agency beliefs to implement adaptation actions. As future climate-related transformations are not anticipated, and as the climate change program in the management plan only considers incremental approaches (SANParks 2020), transition one is only halfway there.

The time perspective links with how individuals understand causality (i.e. linear vs. nested; Bussey 2014), assignment of function, and intentionality (Sztompka 1994; Feola 2015). This linkage helps to explain how people’s mental interpretations of events and their consequences affect the capacity to act and respond to change, influencing agency beliefs. Participants acknowledged that current institutional rules allow the implementation of some adaptation options for species, for example, relocations or genetic interventions. However, they prefer adaptation options that address systems complexity and ecosystems functionality in response to external environmental changes, facilitating nature’s contribution to adaptation (Colloff et al. 2020).

Strong agency beliefs and system perceptions guide processes that accommodate systems changes, explaining the resistance to flag adaptation actions in management plans. Then, implementing a climate change program in the management plan is in tension with the resilience and complex systems theories used for decision-making and the long-term adaptation options defined through landscape and ecosystem-based approaches mentioned in the interviews. Emphasising the relational dynamics of SES through space and time helps to explain how SES relations resist and renegotiate temporal enclosures of a park (Fairbanks et al. 2018). The findings demonstrate that managers are addressing the social values and benefits of the park for local communities, facilitating the second, third, and fourth transitions.

Individuals’ agency focusing on maintaining desired outcomes explains affective responses to adaptation (e.g. preventing species loss), which can be a missed opportunity for transformation. But in the GRNP, the transformative process to address transitions two and four is facilitated by high levels of systems perception, agency beliefs and concern for others. Implementing conservation and adaptation actions beyond the boundaries of a park implies political processes and conversations to reconcile contested values and aspirations for the future, which requires agency beliefs and willingness to question and change current practices. Affective experiences are part of the ontological lens through which individuals make sense of the world and are reflected in the imagined mental models of a system and, therefore, the motivations behind actions (Clifford et al. 2021; Pramova et al. 2021).

High systemic perception, concern for others, and openness to alternatives facilitate new or different relationships between human and non-human agents (Neely 2021), as observed by participants’ heightened sense of social and environmental concerns. The example of the Knysna elephant, or considerations about the potential impacts of climate change in the social context of the park, compel the need to include social and environmental justice considerations in management and adaptation. Interviewees in GRNP are thinking critically about practices in use, considering issues of ethics and care, and demonstrating a strong sense of responsibility in managing natural resources. Traditional adaptation options, such as expanding or creating new protected areas, conflict with the social context and the desire for environmental justice. Despite aspirational goals to address justice and sustainability, GRNP adaptation options are still embedded within command-and-control management, which limits agency and imagination. However, opportunities are opening to co-create a pluralistic vision of the future by including local stakeholders’ perspectives. A transformative process occurring in the GRNP is how participants rethink top-down conservation approaches inside the static boundaries of a protected area and shift towards pluralistic approaches in open systems. Concern for others, systems perception, and time perspective help to reconcile people’s perceptions and values associated with park. This translates into managing social benefits, not only ecological features, indicating that GRNP is well into transition two.

Learning and reflexivity are acknowledged as part of the SAM approach, as documented in the GRNP management plan and the responses shared by the interviewees. The matrix of conservation-based areas mixed with different land uses, being an open park, and using the SAM approach in decision-making, facilitate rethinking temporal perspectives concerning managing change and future transformations. Managers in the GRNP are thinking critically about reconciling rigid governance frameworks that make it difficult to manage complex systems and responses to change, indicating the most pressing issue to address climate adaptation is governance, not just the technical aspects of climate change. Responding to institutionalised calendar times in management plans constrains agency, imagination, and options to anticipate future changes and is a barrier to the third transition.

Climate adaptation requires consideration of individual, social, and institutional learning processes and addressing reflexivity. Reflexivity refers to the self-critical capacity to question ideas, accepted truths, and norms to ‘be and do’ differently, not just critically questioning frames of reference and foundational concepts within individuals’ ethical positions (Pahl-Wostl 2009; Dryzek and Pickering 2019). Under a traditional conservation practice, the SAM approach applied by SANParks indicates strong elements of reflexivity, as observed with respondents critically questioning strategies, frames of reference, and foundational concepts. Learning and reframing SAM is a continuous individual and collective process in SANParks, as was observed in the interviews and documented by Roux et al. (2022). But adapting to climate change as part of SAM has found resistance. Accepting and anticipating climate change in management is a systemic and structural problem that requires learning (and unlearning), engaging in transformative approaches, and rethinking existing assumptions. With climate change, learning approaches in GRNP get constrained by rigid institutional rules and only aim for incremental improvements. Addressing climate change as a driver of social and ecological transformation that can affect the collective vision for the park offers opportunities to enable adaptation (Múnera-Roldán et al. 2020) and transformative governance.

4.2. Transforming adaptation in the GRNP

Futures consciousness can elicit the critical thinking and capabilities required for evolutionary learning-based processes aiming for transformative change. Social and transformative change studies are yet to expand understanding of how individual attitudes towards change shape preferences to engage in collective action (de la Sablonnière 2017; but see; Benessaiah and Eakin 2021). Futures consciousness offers one way to understand such linkages and supports implementing intentional transformative change and learning (Colloff et al. 2021). Transformative change is a long-term learning process and is not straightforward. It requires trust, collaboration, and reflexivity (Gupta 2016). Although management actions in the GRNP are not explicitly described as adaptation, they are opening options for reflexivity and learning about adaptation and transformation in the future. For instance, managers and scientists can reflect on how passively or actively they are creating the future (Sztompka 1993), their perceptions about the pace of change (slow vs rapid), and the speed at which an event impacts collective structures (de la Sablonnière 2017) is influencing choices for the future.

The findings demonstrate that future-oriented capabilities exist in GRNP, providing a basis for managers to discuss climate adaptation and build a collective understanding of recent and future climate changes and what that means in the context of the park’s institutional frameworks (e.g. resilience and SAM). The biggest challenge toward future-oriented conservation in GRNP is overcoming management times that reduce complexity to processes for delivering outcomes instead of achieving implementation of strategies without losing the long-term potential for the future (Múnera-Roldán et al. 2020). Understanding what is in play when individuals face the challenge of different scenarios (i.e. stability or rapid change) is critical to identify options to restructure knowledge and practices. Moreover, the temporal enclosure is no longer a barrier to defining collective visions and negotiating preferred outcomes in the park, opening opportunities to overcome such challenges. For example, power imbalances are addressed by empowering communities through participation in defining a collective vision for park management, as observed in the interviews and literature (Roux et al. 2021), indicating moves towards intentional transformative adaptation (Colloff et al. 2021).

Transitions models help reframe unsustainable practices in managing complex SES, promote reflexive learning, focus on processes rather than outcomes, address power imbalances, and facilitate co-production (Colloff et al. 2021; Reyers et al. 2022). I used the 5DFC to elucidate collective and individual processes involved in defining adaptations and identify governance transitions toward future-oriented practices (van Kerkhoff et al. 2019). The 5DFC model helps explain individual temporal and systems perspectives, illustrating the principles and values used in decision-making, and how institutional frameworks facilitate or constrain agency beliefs.

A fundamental step in engaging in transformation is examining existing governance contexts and recognising that engagement is a political process to negotiate options in complex social-ecological systems. Adaptation is inherently political and not exempt from tensions and contestation. A future-oriented approach must be aware of diverse attitudes toward the future. The findings presented here can inform adaptation or futures literacy processes, helping managers reconcile their assumptions about adapting conservation in a changing climate to create a shared understanding of how different constructions of the future influence choices in the present. In this way, managers can elicit adaptation options and understand what enables and constrains deliberations when developing conservation goals. For example, managers in GRNP can identify potential contradictions between individual and collective aspirations for conservation, how to adapt to future changes, and deliberate on possible limits to adaptation in the park context. A reflexive approach will help critically examine current practices and future outcomes, reshape institutional arrangements to acknowledge the plurality of values and aspirations for the future (Sharpe et al. 2016; Preiser et al. 2021) and negotiate options for conserving biodiversity that contributes to climate adaptation, to other sectors, and society.

5. Conclusions

In doing their work, SANParks staff often face the contested question of conservation of what and for whom? But as they rethink the challenges of managing an open park, GRNP staff are trying to balance collective aspirations of wellbeing and livelihoods for local people with national mandates to conserve nature and sustainable development (Republic of South Africa 1998, 2015). I elaborate on the characteristics of futures consciousness that are involved in decision-making processes by parks staff. The 5DFC provides a structure to understand climate adaptation preferences, expectations, and motivations behind actions considering the interviewees diverse onto-epistemological perspectives and relational approaches The conversations with GRNP staff indicate they have and hold strong elements of futures consciousness. The collective envisioning for defining objectives and programs in the management plan is one of the most innovative and transformational approaches in protected areas management, and an example for other parks in South Africa and abroad. It can potentially catalyse structural changes, transform conflicts, and negotiate power at different scales.

Whose options will prevail in the future is an ongoing process of social becoming in South Africa, to which the protected area can contribute. Despite being an open park, the boundaries of the GRNP are not seen as a limitation for conservation and adaptation actions, opening options to negotiate multiple trajectories, coexistences, and futures across scales and stakeholders. Drawing from the recommendations to assess diverse future approaches as described by Pereira et al. (2021), the GRNP is addressing three of the four challenges related for sound future decision-making: the park is working to be relevant at multiple scales, the participatory approach is enabling inclusion of diverse actors and perspectives, and it is creating innovative options for environmental management in conditions of uncertainty. However, the park is still not working on actively anticipating and responding to unpredictable future conditions (such as climate change). But thanks to the systemic approach to management, options for the future remain open in the GRNP, demonstrating that it is possible to overcome enclosed temporalities of protected areas. This paper offers one pathway to understanding how individuals and institutions anticipate and prepare for adaptation and co-produce positive and desirable futures for conservation.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to SANParks for fieldwork support, and to all interviewees for their time and willingness to share their stories, and to Dirk Roux (SANParks) for supporting the project. Special thanks to Dr. Matthew J. Colloff, Prof. Lorrae van Kerkhoff and Dr. Carina Wyborn (ANU) for the critical comments to this manuscript. I am grateful to the Australian Government Department of Education, Skills, and Employment for the provision of an Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship as part of the Endeavour Leadership Program. This paper is a contribution from the Transformative Adaptation Research Alliance (TARA, https://research.csiro.au/tara/); an international network of researchers and practitioners dedicated to the development and implementation of novel approaches to transformative adaptation to global change.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The total number of interviews was 20, but four were excluded from the analysis in this paper.