Rethinking Conservation for a Changing World: Social-Ecological Insights from Southern Africa

A Public Lecture by Associate Professor Alta De Vos, Centre for Sustainability Transitions, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Conservation is in transition. Spurred by accelerating biodiversity loss and global frameworks like the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), many countries are moving beyond traditional protected areas toward more integrated, inclusive, and landscape-scale approaches. These shifts require negotiating contested values and cross-sectoral trade-offs, and navigating them requires knowledge that can make sense of local complexities and inform real decisions across sectors and scales. This talk explores how social-ecological systems (SES) research can contribute, using the example of Mega Living Landscapes in South Africa. Mega Living Landscapes is South Africa’s (partial) response to the GBF and its complex land history: a national strategy that seeks to align biodiversity goals with land reform, equity redress and the expansion of a biodiversity-based rural economy. Drawing on long-term transdisciplinary work in the wildlife economy and protected areas, Dr De Vos will show how an SES lens can reveal important social, ecological and economic dimensions and critical feedbacks and trade-offs, at scales relevant to planning and policy. Whilst she will discuss a South African example, the talk draws broader insights about current limitations and the potential of SES research to inform decision-making in complex systems. Dr De Vos will close by reflecting on emerging work that seeks to support more comparative, synthesis-oriented approaches within the SES community, aimed at making systems thinking more usable in diverse policy and practice contexts.

Alta De Vos is an interdisciplinary conservation scientist, focusing on two main research areas: the resilience and transformation of conservation systems, and the development of the social-ecological research theory and methods. She uses a wide diversity of mixed- and multi-method approaches,to better understand and direct the future of protected areas and other conservation systems, particularly focusing on non-traditional systems with diverse governance approaches and values.

With her partners, she works at multiple scales to understand how we can better understand these systems in more generalized, yet still context-specific ways to inform more fit-for-purpose policy, but also the changes and pathways that are needed to shape equitable resilience of these systems into an uncertain future.

She directs the Programme on Ecosystem Change and Society (PECS). PECS is a Future Earth core-project that aims to integrate research on the stewardship of social–ecological systems, the services they generate, and the relationships among natural capital, human wellbeing, livelihoods, inequality, and poverty. She is also the science director of the new Society for Social-Ecological Systems (SocSES).

Dr De Vos is a UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow, working with Professor Graeme Cumming in the UWA School of Earth and Oceans and Associate Professor Abbie Rogers in the UWA Centre for Environmental Economics & Policy.