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Abstract
Stewardship is a popular term for the principles and actions aimed at improving sustainability and resilience of social-ecological systems at various scales and in different contexts. Participation in stewardship is voluntary, and is based on values of altruism and long-term benefits. At a global scale, ‘earth stewardship’ is viewed as a successor to earlier natural resource management systems. However, in South Africa, stewardship is narrowly applied to biodiversity conservation agreements on private land. Using a broader definition of stewardship, we identify all potentially related schemes that may contribute to sustainability and conservation outcomes. Stewardship schemes and actors are represented as a social network and placed in a simple typology based on objectives, mechanisms of action and operational scales. The predominant type was biodiversity stewardship programmes. The main actors were environmental non-governmental organisations participating in prominent bioregional landscape partnerships, together acting as important ‘bridging organisations’ within local stewardship networks. This bridging enables a high degree of collaboration between non-governmental and governmental bodies, especially provincial conservation agencies via mutual projects and conservation objectives. An unintended consequence may be that management accountability is relinquished or neglected by government because of inadequate implementation capacity. Other stewardship types, such as market-based and landscape initiatives, complemented primarily biodiversity ones, as part of national spatial conservation priorities. Not all schemes related to biodiversity, especially those involving common pool resources, markets and supply chains. Despite an apparent narrow biodiversity focus, there is evidence of diversification of scope to include more civic and community-level stewardship activities, in line with the earth stewardship metaphor.
Highlights
Over the past decade, ‘stewardship’ has become one of the dominant terms used to describe goals, principles and actions that aim to achieve sustainability in natural resource management, contribute to conservation priorities, and curb environmental degradation that threatens societal well-being.[1,2,3] Stewardship is not a new term[4], nor is it unique to a conservation perspective, e.g. in corporate management[5]
We identified direct linkages (‘edges’) between pairs of nodes from stated collaborations on web pages and other documents, or implied through co-branding or logos on stewardship schemes, with each link assigned an arbitrary weight of one
We identified broad types of stewardship schemes compliant with our definition, and based on information available about their objectives, mechanism of action, operational scale or footprint
Summary
Over the past decade, ‘stewardship’ has become one of the dominant terms used to describe goals, principles and actions that aim to achieve sustainability in natural resource management, contribute to conservation priorities, and curb environmental degradation that threatens societal well-being.[1,2,3] Stewardship is not a new term[4], nor is it unique to a conservation perspective, e.g. in corporate management[5]. The terms ‘ecosystem’ and ‘earth’ stewardship are sometimes used interchangeably (e.g. by Chapin et al.2,6) to describe an overarching framework for dealing with social-ecological vulnerability and promoting general actions and systems that would enhance resilience in the light of global environmental change.[6,7,8]. Stewardship is mostly associated with sustainability in agri-environmental systems (e.g. in the United Kingdom11) or with the adoption of better land and catchment management In South Africa today, ‘stewardship’ in a literal sense is understood to refer mainly to protecting biodiversity on privately owned land, under the banner of so-called Biodiversity Stewardship Programmes (BSPs).[14,15] such initiatives were identified over a decade earlier as a strategy to incentivise ‘off-reserve’ conservation[16], and well before adopting the term stewardship, it is rarely used in any other context
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