Abstract
Nature conservation on privately owned land depends on land managers’ decision-making. Interactions between values, rules and knowledge (vrk) underpin decision-making, thus, it is important to understand these interactions to support conservation intentions. We investigated how different sets of vrk determine the decision-making context regarding the management and conservation of renosterveld, a critically endangered ecosystem in the Cape Floristic Region, and how this relates to land managers’ perceptions of nature’s contributions to people (NCP). From interviews with thirty land managers, we identified nine value types, four rule types, three knowledge types and 13 different NCP. We found that different vrk combinations can be grouped into three decision-making contexts: Bottom-up conservation, Top-down conservation and Utility. Each context is associated with the perception of different beneficial and detrimental NCP. Regulating NCP are perceived across all contexts, whereas more non-material NCP are associated with a Bottom-up conservation context and relational values, such as family ties. The prevalence of relational values in Bottom-up and Top-down conservation contexts illustrates the complexity and non-substitutability of the dynamic relationships between renosterveld and people. This indicates the importance of plural valuation in nature conservation to foster diverse NCP provided by renosterveld.
Highlights
As is widely demonstrated by the evidence given by the global and regional assessments of biodiversity and ecosystem services in the last two decades, biodiversity and its ability to provide multiple nature’s contributions to people (NCP) are increasingly threatened (IPBES 2018, 2019; Handled by Shizuka Hashimoto, University of Tokyo, JapanInstitute of Ecology, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1, 21335 Lüneburg, GermanyAgroecology, Department of Crop Science, Georg-August University Göttingen, Grisebachstraße 6, 37077 Göttingen, GermanyInstitute for Ethics and Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research, Leuphana University Lüneburg, Universitätsallee 1, 21335 Lüneburg, GermanyMillennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005; Díaz et al 2019)
We designed mostly open-ended questions to capture information on beneficial and detrimental NCP (e.g. “What are the benefits from nature on your farm?”; “What threats do you perceive?”), values related to renosterveld (e.g. “What is the renosterveld good for, for you and for society?”; “Why do you appreciate this place?”), the formal and informal rules underpinning land use (e.g. “How do you manage the renosterveld?”; “Do you get any help from external sources for farming or land management?”) and land manager’s knowledge (e.g. “What can you tell me about the renosterveld on your farm?”; “Why did you leave a patch of renosterveld on your farm?”)
We found that in the Bottom-up conservation and Top-down conservation contexts, relational values were associated with local ecological knowledge (LEK) and scientific knowledge, combinations which can contribute to conservation mindsets and pro-environmental behaviour (Gosling and Williams 2010; Keniger et al 2013; Soga and Gaston 2016; Ives et al 2018)
Summary
Land use changes result from the individual and collective decisions on land planning and Sustainability Science management that are underpinned by the complex interactions between individual and societal values, rules and knowledge (IPBES 2019; Colloff et al 2017b). These interactions form part of the institutions, governance structure and societal dynamics that are increasingly recognised as one of the most relevant knowledge gaps in ecosystem service research (Mastrangelo et al 2019)
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