Collaborative stewardship in multifunctional landscapes: Toward relational, pluralistic approaches

Landscape stewardship offers a means to put social-ecological approaches to stewardship into practice. The growing interest in landscape stewardship has led to a focus on multistakeholder collaboration. Although there is a significant body of literature on collaborative management and governance of natural resources, the particular challenges posed by multifunctional landscapes, in which there are often contested interests, require closer attention. We present a case study from South Africa to investigate how collaborative stewardship can be fostered in contested multifunctional landscapes. We conducted this research through an engaged transdisciplinary research partnership in which we integrated social-ecological practitioner and academic knowledge to gain an in-depth understanding of the challenges of fostering collaboration. We identified five overarching factors that influence collaboration: contextual, institutional, social-relational, individual, and political-historical. Collaborative stewardship approaches focused on the development of formal governance institutions appear to be most successful if enabling individual and social-relational conditions are in place. Our case study, characterized by high social diversity, inequity, and contestation, suggests that consensus-driven approaches to collaboration are unlikely to result in equitable and sustainable landscape stewardship in such contexts. We therefore suggest an approach that focuses on enhancing individual and social-relational enablers. Moreover, we propose a bottom-up patchwork approach to collaborative stewardship premised on the notion of pluralism. This would focus on building new interpersonal relationships and collaborative capacity through small collective actions. Taking a relational, pluralistic approach to fostering collaborative stewardship is particularly important in contested, socially heterogeneous landscapes. Drawing on our study and the literature, we propose guiding principles for implementing relational, pluralistic approaches to collaborative stewardship and suggest future research directions for supporting such approaches

Marquette Literary Review, Issue 3, Spring 2011

POETRY RING, Charles Mohl ... 4 BENEATH THE SOUTHERN SUN, Kayla White ... 5 A CHORUS OF AMBITION, Alexandra Boyd ... 9 OF PERCUSSION, Charles Mohl ... 10 HIVES, Charles Mohl ... 11 BBQ, Rose Gregory ... 12 FOREMAN, Anna Olson ... 13 DELIVERY, Rose Gregory ... 14 LIONS IN THE RAIN, Alison Hanley ... 15 SIC TRANSIT, Brad Tharpe ... 16 “TODAY I WON’T REPLY TO YOUR MESSAGES…”, Jahnavi Acharya ... 17 “WELL, IT’S TOMORROW…”, Jahnavi Acharya ... 17 HE CALLED HER PEACH, Kira Boswell ... 18 TRAVELER, Alexandra Boyd ... 19 PROSE FOR MY ________ :, Alison Hanley ... 20 DELILAH, Allison Ellsworth ... 22 INERTIA, Kayla White ... 31 UNTITLED FICTION, Caroline Campbell ... 46 UNTITLED FICTION, Erin Kelly ... 48 I MET HER ON THE STAIRS, Anthony Hollmaier ... 64 THE BARTENDER, Alison Hanley ... 71 ON THE COURT, Matthew Sweeney ... 74 NUMBER 30, Matthew Bin Han Ong ... 89 ON THROWING STONES, Anonymous ... 92 ZEPP’S DINER, Timothy Gorichanaz ... 9

A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2012

Our aim in conducting annual horizon scans is to identify issues that, although currently receiving little attention, may be of increasing importance to the conservation of biological diversity in the future. The 15 issues presented here were identified by a diverse team of 22 experts in horizon scanning, and conservation science and its application. Methods for identifying and refining issues were the same as in two previous annual scans and are widely transferable to other disciplines. The issues highlight potential changes in climate, technology and human behaviour. Examples include warming of the deep sea, increased cultivation of perennial grains, burning of Arctic tundra, and the development of nuclear batteries and hydrokinetic instream turbines