Menelisi Falayi

Biochar is increasingly recognised as a durable carbon dioxide removal pathway with co-benefits for land restoration and agricultural productivity. In Namibia, extensive woody bush encroachment has generated substantial biomass resources, providing a significant opportunity for biochar production as a climate mitigation and land management strategy. Despite this potential, biochar carbon market participation remains limited, even as national interest in carbon market development has increased. This study examines the barriers and enabling conditions shaping the development of biochar carbon markets in Namibia. The analysis draws on stakeholder perspectives from biochar producers, government officials, policymakers, financial institutions, academics, and land users, complemented by a review of policy documents and project reports. The findings indicate that both high- and low-technology production systems face similar institutional constraints. These constraints reflect weaknesses in the regulatory and institutional arrangements governing biochar carbon markets, including limited policy clarity and underdeveloped carbon market and monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) systems. High capital and operating costs, limited awareness of carbon market mechanisms, and restricted access to affordable finance constrain participation, particularly among small-scale producers. Advancing biochar carbon markets in Namibia therefore requires clearer institutional frameworks, targeted financing, and MRV arrangements that account for the durability of biochar carbon storage.

Trophy hunting is one of the most contested conservation activities. There is mounting pressure in the Global North for policy changes that would dramatically curtail the activity across Africa. We synthesized research from 89 peer‐reviewed papers that assessed the impact of trophy hunting on nature and local people across 13 sub‐Saharan African countries. Almost two‐thirds of hunting outcomes were positive, 26% were negative, and 9% were ambiguous. Conservation outcomes for hunted species abundance were more often positive than negative, while impacts on species demographics and vital rates were more variable. Looking beyond hunted species to their habitats, hunting predominantly increased the extent of land conserved. We now need to understand the ecological integrity of these landscapes. Human well‐being outcomes were predominantly positive for income, employment, and food security, while non‐economic dimensions of well‐being were insufficiently studied. Importantly, outcomes were more often positive where land and wildlife use rights, responsibilities and benefits accrued to local landholders or communities. While we cannot assume causality, these insights are aligned with theory that devolving wildlife use rights and revenue control to local people promotes equitable conservation. Policymakers should consider the variation in hunting outcomes across contexts, rather than defaulting to blanket trophy hunting bans.

Mangroves are critical resources in sustaining coastal communities by providing essential ecosystem goods and services. Occurring within the interface of land and sea, they serve as critical ecological zones shaped by dynamic interactions between terrestrial and marine systems. Using qualitative policy analysis of legal instruments, policy documents, and peer‐reviewed literature, the study investigates how nested governance arrangements influence mangrove management. The findings show that mangrove governance across the three contexts takes hybrid forms shaped by historical trajectories and legal pluralism. Although participatory mechanisms such as CREMAs in Ghana, Joint Forest Management in Tanzania Mainland, and Community Forest Management Agreements in Zanzibar formally recognise community involvement, authority remains unevenly distributed due to fragmented institutional mandates and unclear tenure arrangements. As a result, mangrove governance is constrained by overlapping institutional responsibilities and weak enforcement. These findings suggest that reforms should prioritise integrated land–seascape approaches, stronger coordination across sectors, and greater statutory support for local institutions to sustain mangrove ecosystems.

Designing contextually relevant policies for the sustainable governance of social‐ecological systems hinges on an accurate understanding of how social systems are structured and organized through institutions, that is, the set(s) of formal and informal rules that shape human behavior. When researchers only consider either formal (e.g., written law) or informal (e.g., norms) rules, without acknowledging or accounting for the full diversity of rules and their interplay, important drivers of human behavior and collective action can be missed. Yet, there is limited guidance in the literature on the study of institutions regarding how to account for the diverse formal and informal rules in a research design. To address this gap, we present a framework for the study of institutions as sets of formal and informal rules along a gradient of in/formality and within a nexus of rule production, recognition, enforcement, and compliance. This in/formality framework offers a guide for researchers to consider the range of rules beyond the binary of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ in a social‐ecological context. The framework encourages scholars who study diverse institutions to be more reflexive and explicit with their research design, measurement of institutions, and the development of theory and tools for analyzing diverse institutions.

The need to effectively govern and manage communal rangeland resources has become more important over the past two decades, given the extent of biodiversity loss caused by a myriad of drivers interacting at different scales. Using in‐depth interviews, participant observations and historical information from organisational records, we analysed the application of governance objectives between 1947 and 2017 and their corresponding rangeland condition outcome in Machubeni (South Africa) communal lands. The results show that while the application of governance objectives varied through time, there has been a steady degradation of local rangeland resources since apartheid, due to internal and external drivers of change. This reveals a disconnection between management and resource conditions, suggesting that a return to effective governance alone will not necessarily result in improved rangeland condition in Machubeni, but that more radical steps such as prolonged periods of resting, reseeding and building individual and group agency, are needed. These findings can help practitioners working in post‐colonial territories to design effective rangeland management models. Read the freePlain Language Summaryfor this article on the Journal blog.

Drought is a natural phenomenon which can cause widespread socio-economic and environmental impacts. Recent predictions suggest that drought frequency and intensity will increase in Southern Africa; therefore, there is a need for more scientific information on drought impacts and responses by vulnerable groups such as smallholder farmers. This scoping review examines the current state of research and conceptual insights on the impacts of drought on and responses by smallholder farmers in rural and urban settings in South Africa. We used three bibliographic databases (Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCOHost) to search for peer-reviewed literature published on South Africa. In total, 18 articles were reviewed, and information on drought impacts and responses among smallholder farmers was analysed and synthesised. Although most of the reviewed papers identified several socio-economic (e.g., loss of livestock, income, and employment) and environmental (e.g., loss of grazing land and vegetation) impacts of drought, the identified impacts were rarely quantified, and there is a lack of analytical depth of these impacts. Smallholder farmers in South Africa implement several drought responses, and these were categorised based on (i) changes in local practices and lifestyles e.g., practising conservation agriculture, (ii) structural measures e.g., government relief programmes, and (iii) technical interventions e.g., rain harvesting. None of the reviewed papers reported on the impacts of and responses to drought on smallholder farmers in urban settings. Overall, the review noted that the literature on drought in South Africa lacks detailed quantification and analysis of drought impacts and responses, the urban drought context is poorly understood, and there is a lack of clarity on the distinction between adaptation and mitigation strategies. Improving our understanding of drought impacts across a rural-urban gradient is important if responses are to effectively reduce smallholder farmer drought vulnerability.

Summary: Throughout southern Africa, there have been growing concerns about the rates of ecosystem degradation. This issue and natural resource governance concerns in general remain key challenges. We conducted a scoping review of 135 articles to inductively assess how governance challenges have manifested in natural resource management during 2010–2020 in southern Africa. The paper’s findings show that governance challenges in southern Africa are ‘hydra-headed’. The results suggest that governance challenges related to the maintenance of system integrity and functioning – specifically lack of coordination, accountability, capacity, skills and resources to define effective natural resource management – were the most reported in literature. Challenges related to achieving socially equitable governance were the second most mentioned, followed by those related to institutional robustness. Challenges related to the adaptability and flexibility of institutions, specifically learning, monitoring capacity and innovation, were the least identified, showing that these areas are poorly studied or that these attributes are considered less problematic for achieving sustainable outcomes. Furthermore, the review highlights critical gaps – the limited engagement with governance-related frameworks, specifically polycentricity, adaptive governance and social-ecological stewardship. In concluding, we highlight governance reforms and future research needs on the topic of natural resources in southern Africa.

The loss of ecosystem services through land degradation continues to be a significant concern for policymakers and land users around the world. Facilitating collective action among various actors is regarded as imperative in halting land degradation. Despite extensive research on collective action, there have been few studies that continuously map social ties and detect network evolution as a way of enabling longitudinal analysis of transformative spaces. This paper seeks to examine the changing dynamics of multi-actor and multi-level actor ties over a period of two years in Machubeni, South Africa. To do this, we used social network analysis to detect continuities and/or discontinuities of multi-actor and multi-level actor ties over time. Overall, edge density, clustering coefficient, and reciprocity scores steadily increased over the two years despite a decline in the number of active organisations within the network. Our results demonstrate that the proportion of strong ties gradually increased over time across three governance networks. However, multi-level linkages between the local municipality and the local organisations remained weak due to a lack of trust and collaborative fatigue. While the transformative space has succeeded in enhancing collaboration and knowledge sharing between local organisations and researchers, further long-term engagement with government agencies might be necessary for promoting institutional transformations and policy outcomes, and building network resilience in complex polycentric governance systems.