Abstract
Conservation has historically struggled to promote equitable and inclusive governance processes and outcomes for marginalised groups. While influential international conservation theory and practice strands have drawn upon participatory development theories to promote a more inclusive approach to conservation, many conservation initiatives continue to exclude marginalised people from governance processes and produce underwhelming development outcomes. This continued exclusion conflicts with broader global development priorities of enhanced equity and inclusion as outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals. Against this backdrop, the integrated landscape approach (ILA) has emerged as a popular theory of integrated land governance and management, which seeks to reconcile broad-scale conservation and development issues. A core premise of the landscape approach is that it can promote inclusive landscape governance by applying multistakeholder governance platforms. However, there is a dearth of in-depth case study research on ILAs in practice, and few studies have interrogated if, how and why marginalised people are included in or excluded from the governance processes and outcomes that underpin ILA practice. This issue is particularly relevant in South Africa, where South Africa’s conservation agencies and NGOs have widely adopted ILAs. Still, stark inequalities continue to characterise South Africa’s landscapes.
This thesis contributes to debates around inclusive governance within conservation theory, policy and practice by critically investigating ILAs as a theory and practice of inclusive conservation governance. To meet this aim, qualitative case study research was conducted in the Agulhas Plain of South Africa. In the Agulhas Plain, landscape conservation interventions have been implemented for nearly 20 years but significant conservation and human development challenges still characterise the landscape. Data was collected through an extensive analysis of project documents, interviews and focus groups with key informants such as NGO representatives, community leaders, landowners, government officials and project beneficiaries, and participant observation of multistakeholder stakeholder meetings, project sites, and townships where marginalised group live in the landscape. The research utilised an adapted version of the Collaborative Governance Framework (Emerson et al., 2012) to examine the landscape conservation governance context, processes, and outcomes in the Agulhas and Plain to analyse how marginalised people are included in the landscape governance system that is institutionalised through ILA practice.
The empirical findings reveal that by and large, marginalised people were not meaningfully included in the multistakeholder governance processes that underpin landscape initiatives in the Agulhas Plain and were included inequitably in project outcomes. Critical analysis revealed that factors of uneven territorial control, funding dynamics, and anti-politics that underpin current ILA practices in the Agulhas Plain reproduce and obscure the systemic structures and mechanisms of exclusion and inequity that remain unchallenged in current ILA theory and practice. The findings suggest that the theorisation of inclusivity within ILA needs to permeate beyond the theorisation of multistakeholder platforms, as these platforms have proven to be an insufficient tool for inclusivity in the Agulhas Plain context and do not account for the systemic barriers of meaningful inclusion identified through the case study. This research implores ILA theorists and practitioners to ‘jump off the platform’ and embrace a more politically strategic and holistic understanding of inclusivity that transcends current multistakeholder and market-based inclusion strategies. To this end, this thesis drew on convivial conservation and inclusive development scholarship to develop the concept of convivial inclusivity, which reframes inclusivity as a long-term, post-capitalist political project engaging with political struggles at various spatial scales. In developing the idea of convivial inclusivity, the thesis reimagines the political strategies and practices that ILAs and a more inclusive conservation agenda can draw upon to create a just and transformative conservation praxis.