Karen Nortje

The politics of establishing catchment management agencies in South Africa: the case of the Breede-Overberg Catchment Management Agency

Copyright: 2014 Edward Elgar Publishing, UK. Due to copyright restrictions, the attached PDF file only contains the pre-print of the full text item. For access to the full text item, please consult the publishers website.

Relevance of national and local government policy to sustainable community natural resource management in South Africa

Development in South Africa is guided by the principle of sustainability, and this is underpinned by integration, which is the consideration of social, economic and environmental factors in decision making. Policies are in place at national and local government level to ensure integration. A key integration instrument at municipality level (the lowest unit of local government) is the Integrated Development Plan (IDP), a strategic planning tool meant to guide all planning and management in a municipality. At national level, the National Environmental Management Act, in particular its philosophy of Integrated Environmental Management (IEM) is supposed to provide guidance on sustainable development. In municipalities, communal natural resource management decisions are made at community level. There are no instruments to guide this decision making to ensure integration. This study analysed natural resource management decision making at community level, focussing on agricultural land use. The objectives were (i) to assess whether agricultural land use decision making incorporated integration principles and (ii) to assess applicability of the IDP and IEM as instruments for incorporating integration into community level decision making. Information was collected through a review of national and local government policies and interviews at municipal and community levels. Decision making was found to be focused on addressing social and economic needs with little consideration for the environment. The IDP had no relevance to community level decision making while the principles of IEM could be applied to incorporate integration into decision making.

Decision-making processes in agrarian landscapes of Limpopo province, South Africa: implications for landscape multi-functionality

Agrarian landscapes in Makhado Local Municipality in the Limpopo Province of South Africa provide for the livelihood needs of diverse groups of people. Therefore, the demands that are made on these landscapes as well as the increasing environmental and socio-economic problems, require multi-functional landscape management. Decision- making is crucial to management, and understanding decision-making processes in these landscapes is pivotal to an integrated and coordinated management. This article seeks to understand the decision-making processes and their implications for the multi-functionality of agrarian landscapes in Makhado Local Municipality under two land tenure regimes, namely communal and restitution land. In order to make sense of the complex set of actors and institutions, their demands and needs as well as how decisions are being made in the end within the context of common property and common-pool resources, the article makes use of the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD). Results show that often decisions are made on an ad hoc basis with no consultation and coordination among the actors, and there appears to be no agreed criteria to guide decision-making.

BRINGING THE INTEGRATIVE ASPECT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INTO COMMUNITY NATURA L RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: THE CASE OF AGRICULTURAL LAND USE IN LIMPOPO, SOUTH AFRICA

Rural communities in South Africa manage natural resources under conditions of resource degradation driven by unsustainable practices. This is against a backdrop of the country adopting the principle of sustainable development and putting in place policies to facilitate integrated decision making, which is pivotal to sustainable development. Sustainable development is an integrative concept with a basis in a ‘whole systems approach’. There are no tools tailored to facilitate integration in community level decision making in South Africa and there is need to develop such tools. In line with the stakeholder approach, users have to be involved in the development of the tools and inform their content. The question is whether community level users are able to adequately inform such tools. The objective of this study was to assess the input of potential community level users into development of a decision support tool for improving integration in natural resource management (specifi cally agricultural land use) decision making. Stakeholder analysis was used to identify decision makers and their responsibilities and elucidate decision-making processes, criteria, context and characteristics of the tool. The main fi ndings were that (i) community agricultural land use decisions focus on addressing social and economic needs with no consideration for the environment; (ii) users visualised the tool as a set of guidelines for enabling equal consideration of social, economic and environmental factors and expected it to facilitate group decision making, communication and participation of different stakeholders in decision making. Stakeholder expectations for the tool were different. Stakeholder analysis was used to accommodate these different perspectives and reach consensus on issues. Stakeholders were able to provide integral information to developing a tool that is both acceptable to users and addresses the integration principle of sustainable development.