Browsing by Author "Du Plessis, Sandra"

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    The legitimacy of different conservation approaches in a transboundary protected area system
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Du Plessis, Sandra; Muller, Kobus ; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. School of Public Leadership.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY: This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary study of two park buffer systems, positioned in a larger transfrontier conservation system in Southern Africa. The first case study concerns the Makuleke community in South Africa who were empowered by winning back rights to their traditional land in the Kruger National Park (KNP) from which they had been evicted. The second case study concerns the displaced Xingwedzi community, across the border in Mozambique, who have been disempowered by losing the rights to their traditional land as a result of the Parque Nacional do Limpopo (PNL)/Limpopo National Park being proclaimed. Examining the empowered and the disempowered populations situated in the same transboundary protected area provided the researcher with insights into issues of power, equity and justice related to the different governance arrangements that parks implement for natural resource protection. Institutional theory provides the main orientation of the study. A mixed methodology approach was utilised to gather data from a variety of sources associated with each resource regime. First, the historical context of past resource regimes at both national and local level was examined to determine how the historical institutions influence the current governance systems. Vatn’s (2015) Environmental Governance Framework (EGS) was utilised to analyse the interplay between the institutional and cognitive processes and the attributes of the protected areas (PAs) and the ways they influenced a set of outcomes. The outcomes analysed include (i) the state of conflict between the park and the local actors, (ii) the local attitudes towards the protected areas according to local actors, (iii) the sense of well-being of local actors in the communal areas, and finally (iv) the perceived viability of the natural resource protection strategies in each protected area. Lastly, the criteria of input and output legitimacy were applied to evaluate both procedural justice and distributive justice of the current park buffer governance structures. The findings reveal that remnants of traditional governance systems from previous resource regimes are still influential in both cases. Regression models show that giving legal rights to producer communities to access benefits from PAs is associated with lower levels of conflict as well as better protection of natural resources in the PA. The findings of this study indicate that the provision of key social services, such as access to clean water, inside or nearby the villages of the affected communities is associated with a local sense of well-being and good relations between the park and the community members. However, the temporality and fragility of infrastructure means that manmade capital is rarely able to provide the same level of accumulated social services in the long term as fully functioning natural systems. It is concluded that it is not the material goods or technology that ultimately facilitates the affected communities’ survival, needs and dignity in the new area to which they resettle. It is rather the institutional environment that is key to achieving distributive justice. Giving those communities who are ancestrally connected to the PA land legal rights to benefits, which are compatible with conservation objectives, is therefore the most critical component of PA compensation programmes.