Browsing by Department "Environmental Humanities South"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    An Inquiry Into the Diverse Modes of Caring in Khayelitsha Wetlands Parks World of Many Worlds
    (2023) Sibango, Asemahle; Solomon, Nikiwe; Abrams, Amber
    The management and governance of wetlands in Cape Town is largely informed by economic, techno-scientific, and engineering approaches which are deeply rooted in discourses of “Earth mastery”. Earth mastery aims to command, predict, and control the Earth's natural processes to access ecosystem services to benefit humans. When wetland management is solely informed by logics of domination and extraction for humans, then other ways of knowing, being, being with, and caring for spaces such as the Khayelitsha Wetlands Park (KWP) are often overlooked and overshadowed. Using Maria Puig de la Bellacasa's (2011:90) work on ‘Matters of Care in Technoscience' where the notion of care is viewed as “an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation”, this thesis draws attention to meanings, practices, and enactment of care through thinking with people and the more-than-human worlds in the KWP. Based on eight months of research in the KWP which involved looking at this space's associated landscapes and multispecies communities, this thesis explores ways of living with and relating to the KWP in Cape Town, South Africa, which do not subscribe to logics of domination. This is done by highlighting the often overshadowed and taken for granted forms of care and reciprocity that do not fall into the realm of the “advanced”, “technical”, and “objective” approaches in techno-scientific and engineering practices. In this thesis, I argue that people who live with urban wetlands practise their more-than-techno-scientific approaches and versions of care in these spaces. The evidence basis for these more-than-techno-scientific and more-than-engineering approaches of care are drawn from firstly, people's stories and experiences of relating to and living with the KWP and secondly, an analysis of care, coexistence, and co-becoming among more-than-human species in KWP. This thesis then suggests the importance of deconstructing and queering the understandings of care practices in wetland spaces by arguing that the government and institutions responsible for wetlands could draw on decolonial approaches in managing and practising care in these spaces, shifting from logics of control and domination to relational and historicised interactions with wetlands to address environmental injustices of the past and of the present. Queer theory is often associated with gender and sexuality where it means diverging from what is normalised, for instance, understanding that there are other ways of being outside heteronormative binaries. For this thesis I conceive queering beyond the context of gender and sexuality, for instance, I suggest the importance of being aware that KWP and wetlands in general host multiple worlds. Thus, governmental approaches of managing and caring for these waterbodies should not only conform to the techno-scientific and engineering notions of care. I suggest that these governmental approaches should be democratized and open a space to be informed by citizen science as well. They should understand that their approaches should not be a “one size fits all” as modes of being and of living differ from space to space. This thesis therefore uses the concept of queering as a way to suggest that techno-scientific governmental approaches of caring for wetlands must recognize the efforts of care that are practised by people and multispecies who live with these waterbodies and to start co-existing with them instead of overlooking and overshadowing them. This thesis, drew from the environmental humanities, environmental anthropology, and queer conceptual and theoretical schools of thought to achieve its purpose. 
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    Community-based natural resource management: The case of Community Forest Management Areas in Pete, Zanzibar
    (2017) Dabo, Dina; Matose, Frank
    The shift from centralised conservation to Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) was the highlight of the conservation discourse across the world during the late 1980s and early 1990s. CBNRM efforts were believed to have the potential of successfully merging biodiversity conservation simultaneously with local development efforts. However, the increasing critiques against the applicability of CBNRM interventions in different contexts is threatening the viability of the approach. Extant literature on CBNRM interventions focuses on the theoretical aspects of such efforts at the expense of the practical and context specific elements. This thesis intends to fill such a gap in literature by focusing on the practical and contextual elements of an example of this approach in Zanzibar. In an attempt to conserve the isles' natural forests, Zanzibar has adopted Community-Forest Management Areas (CoFMAs) bordering its natural forests. In this study, focus is placed on Pete's CoFMA, a village bordering the isles' last remaining natural forests- Jozani-Chwaka Bay National Park (JCBNP). Pete provides an ideal site due to the conflict that exists between residents and the CoFMA intervention. By using the political ecological framework, this study is able to examine the political, social, historical and economic elements that play a significant role in the practice of CBNRM efforts. Narratives from residents are relied on to elucidate on such elements in relation to the existence of the CoFMA in Pete Village. Narratives gathered through interviews and participant observation concluded that while CoFMAs have been set up with the optimistic goal of conserving the forest and providing development to community members; in practice, the conservation intervention has proved otherwise. In spite of the achievement of some developmental goals, the overall findings indicate that the CoFMA has failed to protect the forests and its natural resources from degradation. At the same time, community members are facing difficulties to live a sustainable life.
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    Examining the mechanisms for and factors affecting benefit sharing in two South African aquaculture projects
    (2024) Agiotis, Brett; Sowman, Merle
    The Blue Economy, that gained traction at the Rio + 2012 Earth Summit hosted by the United Nations, has been put forward as a concept to fast-track socio-economic development in the ocean space in a way that integrates marine conservation and social equity. Aquaculture is one of the key sectors of the Blue Economy and is seen as a frontier for driving economic growth, enhancing food security, and relieving the pressure of capture fisheries. What remains uncertain is the extent to which these high-level policy interventions translate into benefits for people on the ground who are directly and indirectly affected by them. The aim of this study was to contribute to a better understanding of the perceptions of benefits marginalised individuals and coastal communities in South Africa derive from involvement in Blue Economy projects linked to aquaculture as well as the key factors enabling and inhibiting benefit sharing. In contexts where local people perceive that they benefit from Blue Economy activities, the study unravels whether the distribution of those benefits is seen as fair and equitable. The study used two aquaculture projects implemented in Doringbaai and Saldanha Bay on the West Coast of South Africa as a lens. These aquaculture projects were implemented with the aim of creating jobs, enhancing food security, building skills, and benefiting individuals and the wider community. Findings revealed that despite positive impacts through employment, skills development, and the establishment of aquaculture enterprises, several factors influenced the effectiveness of benefit sharing for individuals and coastal communities leading to negative perceptions regarding these interventions. Unequal power relations, flawed benefit sharing arrangements, and the COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on benefit sharing outcomes envisaged for both projects. 3 Moreover, while the South African government made considerable effort to support individual and wider coastal community participation in the aquaculture sector, the level of postimplementation support from the state for these projects was lacking. Based on an enhanced understanding of how the projects were executed as well as individual and community perceptions of benefit sharing, this study argues that the nature of benefit sharing arrangements, the institutional arrangements, and power dynamics amongst actors involved in the aquaculture projects can significantly influence the extent to which people benefit. Other factors such as power dynamics, participation, transparency, transfer of skills, post-implementation support, robust institutions, and effective benefit sharing arrangements must be considered in the planning and implementation of Blue Economy projects and programmes. This is vital in order to ensure that aquaculture projects involving individuals and communities can be financially viable, sustainable, and achieve equitable social benefits.
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    Examining the mechanisms for and factors affecting benefit sharing in two South African aquaculture projects
    (2024) Agiotis, Brett; Sowman, Merle
    The Blue Economy, that gained traction at the Rio + 2012 Earth Summit hosted by the United Nations, has been put forward as a concept to fast-track socio-economic development in the ocean space in a way that integrates marine conservation and social equity. Aquaculture is one of the key sectors of the Blue Economy and is seen as a frontier for driving economic growth, enhancing food security, and relieving the pressure of capture fisheries. What remains uncertain is the extent to which these high-level policy interventions translate into benefits for people on the ground who are directly and indirectly affected by them. The aim of this study was to contribute to a better understanding of the perceptions of benefits marginalised individuals and coastal communities in South Africa derive from involvement in Blue Economy projects linked to aquaculture as well as the key factors enabling and inhibiting benefit sharing. In contexts where local people perceive that they benefit from Blue Economy activities, the study unravels whether the distribution of those benefits is seen as fair and equitable. The study used two aquaculture projects implemented in Doringbaai and Saldanha Bay on the West Coast of South Africa as a lens. These aquaculture projects were implemented with the aim of creating jobs, enhancing food security, building skills, and benefiting individuals and the wider community. Findings revealed that despite positive impacts through employment, skills development, and the establishment of aquaculture enterprises, several factors influenced the effectiveness of benefit sharing for individuals and coastal communities leading to negative perceptions regarding these interventions. Unequal power relations, flawed benefit sharing arrangements, and the COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on benefit sharing outcomes envisaged for both projects. 3 Moreover, while the South African government made considerable effort to support individual and wider coastal community participation in the aquaculture sector, the level of postimplementation support from the state for these projects was lacking. Based on an enhanced understanding of how the projects were executed as well as individual and community perceptions of benefit sharing, this study argues that the nature of benefit sharing arrangements, the institutional arrangements, and power dynamics amongst actors involved in the aquaculture projects can significantly influence the extent to which people benefit. Other factors such as power dynamics, participation, transparency, transfer of skills, post-implementation support, robust institutions, and effective benefit sharing arrangements must be considered in the planning and implementation of Blue Economy projects and programmes. This is vital in order to ensure that aquaculture projects involving individuals and communities can be financially viable, sustainable, and achieve equitable social benefits.
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    Hippopotami in a liminal space: a multi-species ethnography of Lake Tanganyika in Bujumbura
    (2022) Maksudi, Bakenga; Solomon, Nikiwe; Matose, Frank
    This thesis explores how human encroachment has significantly altered Lake Tanganyika's freshwater ecosystem and riparian zone in Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi, which affects the daily life and interactions between humans and hippopotami (hippo). Societal development agendas have favoured economic growth and infrastructural development with little regard for the well-being of multi-species communities. The study contrasts the ideas that drive economy-based approaches to development and environmental management with the many engagements with the lake, and how this in turn affects human-hippo relations on Lake Tanganyika's riparian zone. Environmental protection and management discourses are frequently portrayed as a unified, single, objectivist practice, however, their contextual enactment differs from discipline to discipline and across municipal interventions and service delivery. The study investigates how the current settlement developments affect human-hippo relations. Specific research questions include, what are the intersecting human-hippo interactions that exist in Bujumbura's lakeshore neighbourhoods? What impacts do these interactions have on people and hippos? What interventions can help restore the degraded environment and foster kinship? I respond to these questions by engaging with current debates in environmental humanities, cultural, and environmental anthropology on human-multi-species entanglements. Both grounded theory and multi-species ethnography approaches were used as data collection and analytic tools in this study. I trace nutrient and energy flows to foreground the interdependencies between the “human world” and “natural world”, a separation that is no longer viable in the time of the Anthropocene. Triangulated data sets are used to narrate stories and critically discuss the current environmental challenges using ecocentric, and actor-network theory as the conceptual frameworks. Although population growth is considered a key factor in environmental degradation, I argue that the deterioration of the environment, particularly the coastal landscape, may be attributed to improper and unclear land-water management. The findings of this study indicate that land acquisition on the riparian zone for settlement development in the Gisyo and Kibenga is associated with power and affluence by some members of society. Potential land-water insights and spatial planning approaches for a human-and-hippo-friendly riparian zone are proposed.
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    Rivers that become reservoirs: an ethnography of water commodification in Lesotho
    (2022) Sello, Kefiloe; Green, Lesley
    Through exploring the relationship of people to water and how that relationship changes when water becomes a commodity, this study addresses the devaluation of the relationship of people and water in the environment they live in and contrasts the devaluation with the value attributed to commodified water by neoliberal economic policy. Where the relationships between people and water are financialised, commodification sets people and water apart in planning and policies as if they are separate entities. Focusing on the effects of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project in the commodification of water in Lesotho, this study contrasts life lived with freeflowing water and with commodified water. Through ethnographic data collected over 18 months in three villages around the Katse Dam and the Mohale Dam, the dissertation demonstrates that development agencies do not take into consideration the human-nonhuman relationship that exist between communities and their environment. The study demonstrates that economic development through the damming of rivers has rendered people both ecologically and economically precarious. Drawing from these findings, the study proposes that development based on the extraction of natural resources and the assumption that people and environment are separate, should be replaced with an integrated theory of habitability and wellbeing that includes, in its social theory, the relationships of people with soil and water. The thesis was guided by multispecies, political ecology and economic anthropology theories.
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    Texturing absence: a geography of the disappeared Woodstock Beach
    (2023) Anderson, Molly; Daya, Shari
    Up until the late 1960s, the Cape Town suburb of Woodstock had a beach. Decades of land reclamation – begun as early as 1890 – culminated in the beach being entirely subsumed by railways, roads, and harbor infrastructure. Woodstock's beachside heritage is largely unknown, as are the processes by which it disappeared, meaning that its role as a site of shipwrecks, a source of food, and a place of leisure has long gone unexplored and unacknowledged. What does the presence, and then absence, of Woodstock Beach mean for people and place in Cape Town? Understanding the role of Woodstock Beach in the making of the city requires a methodological approach that is attuned to both presence and absence. The method of ‘texture' draws on creative and critical approaches to trace the beach through material inscriptions, memories, metaphors, archives and histories. Texture offers an extended rigor by engaging ambiguities, absences, glimpses, and incoherent strands as generative moments that allow more traces to be followed. This critical and creative orientation is engaged in the analysis and the writing of these stories. Attending to Woodstock Beach in this way reveals a series of small-scale and intimate stories about everyday people and things, which layer and juxtapose with stories of slavery, dispossession, colonialism, capitalism, and apartheid. The stories of Woodstock Beach – its presence and its disappearance – illuminate continuities and connections across place, time, and scale which highlight the nuanced, complicated, and always ongoing ways in which place and its politics are made and re-made both in Cape Town, and at a countrywide scale.
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    The Kuils River multiple: versions of an urban river on the edge of Cape Town, South Africa
    (2022) Solomon, Nikiwe; Green, Lesley
    This thesis explores how diverse ways of knowing and being with the Kuils River, located in Cape Town, South Africa, are shaped and in turn shape the river. The management of water (in pipes and rivers) and the development of water infrastructure are deeply rooted in societal development agendas that, over time, have been embedded in discourses of empire, economic growth, state formation, sustainability and technological efficiency. When river management is informed by different agendas, the practice of management then differs across different levels of governance, research and communities, and multiple meanings of different forms of human-water relationships emerge. This study examines how the resulting tangle of meanings impacts river management practices in Cape Town, and in turn shape the well-being of people and more-than-human communities living in and with the river. Specific research questions include: What are the diverse ways of knowing and relating to the Kuils River? How are these diverse ways of knowing and relating enacted? How does this shape river and capital flows, governance and the well-being of multispecies communities? Based on roughly three years of transdisciplinary methods of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and water testing in the Kuils River catchment area, this thesis explores how lives, politics, technology and environment are impacted by river management practices in Cape Town and how these produce different versions of the river, which in turn shape the everyday of the Kuils and how it is managed. In focusing on the multiple interactions with the Kuils River and its associated water bodies and on the flow of the river itself at community and governance levels, this thesis foregrounds differing meanings of ‘environment' and their management and how these versions limit the achievement of urban and peri-urban wellbeing. This thesis highlights the divergent experiences of the managed Kuils River (including those of people and of the water body) to demonstrate that particular logics have geological effects that will be experienced far into the future.