Sustainable biodiversity stewardship and inclusive development in South Africa: a novel package for a sustainable future

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2017.03.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Sustainable biodiversity stewardship on private lands that promote inclusive development is needed.

  • Well-designed fiscal incentives in sustainable biodiversity stewardship contribute to social and ecological goals of inclusive development.

  • The effectiveness and trade-offs of fiscal incentives are ascertained and described.

  • This paper provides a framework to advance sustainable biodiversity stewardship and inclusive development on private lands.

Sustainable biodiversity stewardship (SBS) is needed on private lands in order to promote inclusive development (ID). Managing private land for conservation and landscape functionality can be costly, therefore, fiscal incentives like income tax deductions and property rates exclusions can help encourage biodiversity stewardship and thereby contribute to meeting the social and ecological goals of inclusive development. The experience of South Africa shows that such fiscal incentives can ensure that private landowners protect ecosystems, improve water yields, mitigate fire and flood risks, and promote landscape-scale connectivity. Furthermore, it can contribute to broader socio-economic goals such as rural development, inclusion of marginalized or disadvantaged communities and create green jobs. This paper reports that many private landowners have entered into agreements for biodiversity stewardship.

Introduction

This paper focuses on fiscal incentives in sustainable biodiversity stewardship (SBS) that contribute to Inclusive Development (ID) [1••, 2] and how they relate to nature conservation [3••, 4]. To foster ID in SBS through financial instruments, the government needs a holistic approach to address nature conservation priorities, poverty alleviation and inequality [5]. This is particularly important for a country like South Africa where for over two decades, the government has been working to address the rich–poor gap and historical injustices [5, 6, 7].

In South Africa, fiscal incentives have been offered to landowners [4, 8•] for biodiversity stewardship. Managing private land for conservation can be expensive [3••, 9•] and complicated, especially when it comes to stakeholder engagement, which in many instances is shied away from [10••]. The fiscal incentives approach is considered relevant for encouraging biodiversity stewardship on private lands [3••, 11, 12, 13, 14•]. However, the effectiveness of fiscal incentives for biodiversity stewardship that contributes to ID has not been assessed in depth. Additionally, though it has been recognized that SBS can provide many benefits, initiatives to advance SBS in these countries where a large portion of natural land is privately owned are difficult to develop because more pressing issues such as poverty and ill-health often take precedence over the goals of nature conservation. The move towards inclusive development thinking [1••] begins to add a stronger rigor to making socio-economic concerns and the environment more evenly matched and inclusive [15, 16]. It is, therefore, an important step forward to couch the SBS debates on incentives against this backdrop and in the context of ID, as an overarching, macro scale framework [1••].

The literature was reviewed across disciplines in order to examine the contributions of SBS to ID. Literature sources included academic papers, government reports as well as website interrogation. The literature review was supported with first-hand experience of SBS and ID practices gained from stakeholder engagement and consultations. The geographical demarcation of the research area was South Africa; financial instruments within this study area were identified and their impacts on SBS and ID were analyzed. This paper, therefore, addresses this issue as it relates to private land ownership in the context of South Africa [14•, 17, 18, 19]. It (a) to analyzes the potential contributions of SBS to ID, (b) identifies the financial instruments that can incentivise SBS, (c) assesses their impacts (effectiveness and trade-offs), and (d) develops a framework to advance SBS and ID on private lands.

Section snippets

Sustainable biodiversity stewardship, inclusive development and private land management

The concept of SBS is straightforward when compared to the broad notion of ID [2, 20, 21••]. ID incorporates the social and ecological aspects of sustainable development in the broader spectrum of social, political and economic processes for human well-being, empowerment, social and environmental sustainability [1••, 21••, 22]. It requires proactive measures to meet the needs of society, particularly disadvantaged communities to ensure equity and access to benefits [2••]. SBS is an approach to

Fiscal incentives and benefits for sustainable biodiversity stewardship and inclusive development

This article assesses the financial instruments and benefits that can incentivise SBS focusing on (a) agreements, (b) income tax deductions, (c) property rates exclusions, (d) benefits, and (e) capacity building and skills development.

Agreements

Agreements are important to smoothen the functions of programs and shared responsibilities for SBS on private lands. Table 1 reveals the stewardship categories that have been given a certain lease period for management within a possible fiscal incentive mechanism [

A framework to advance sustainable biodiversity stewardship and inclusive development on private lands

A framework to enable fiscal incentives in SBS to ID (Table 2, Figure 2) requires a long-term management strategy and allied services for SBS by identifying biodiversity priority areas to be managed and contribute to inclusive development [1••, 16]. The National Environment Management: Protected Areas Act (Act 57 of 2003) (referred hereafter as; the Protected Areas Act) and the National Environmental Management: Biodiversity Act (Act 10 or 2004) (NEM:BA) [8•, 24, 36] say that fiscal incentives

Conclusion

This paper concludes that fiscal incentives in SBS can contribute to ID by prioritizing nature conservation, productive employment, poverty alleviation and reducing inequality. It further suggests that historical injustices and the rich–poor gap that the government has been working for over two decades could be addressed through operationalizing ID. Fiscal incentives in SBS that contribute to ID are critical for private land management to participate in SBS programs. Well-designed fiscal

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the head, Sustainability Research Unit and Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa, for the provision of research facilities and support. The author wishes to express his sincere thanks to Robert Fincham, Nicolas Cole, Tatenda Mapeto and Maretha Alant for their useful inputs, suggestions and comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. The author also thanks the two anonymous referees and the editors (Joyeeta Gupta and Nicky Pouw) of this special issue for their

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