Cross-scale governance and ecosystem service delivery: A case narrative from the Olifants River in north-eastern South Africa

Abstract

In late 2005 the lower stretches of the Olifants river in South Africa, flowing through the Kruger National Park before entering Mocambique, dried up for 78days, curtailing critical ecosystem services. Our retrospective case study attributes this to failure of effective cross-scale collaboration and co-constructed action. We detail how a more effective response was mounted after the governance crisis had first deepened, which, along with more recent broader but related societal responses, has maintained these water-related ecosystem services.The narrative describes part crisis response, part chance emergence, and along the way building of trust. Persistent staff capacity across agencies, whose members developed a sufficiently overlapping vision, was deemed crucial. The widening of linkages across scales and levels was a key feature, though attention is drawn to other important factors such as power dynamics. The difficulties encountered gave birth to new hope, with full recognition that such messy and dynamic social-ecological systems need to be navigated as best possible using complexity-friendly adaptive approaches, containing elements (including important cross-scale ones) that came together in this case. This case narrative is believed to contain generic lessons for ecosystem service governance.