Wildness as a science-policy bridge for a better world

Abstract

The world is losing its wildness – in the form of both wilderness areas and the ecological functioning of wildlife populations. While most literature investigates this loss as the negative consequences for biodiversity conservation and global conservation targets, especially through area-based conservation interventions, a more productive framing asks how the loss of wildness impacts socio-economic systems and how ‘rewilding’ can enhance society beyond the obvious benefits to biodiversity. In this thesis, I explore the concept of wildness as a ‘boundary object’ that can connect different stakeholders under a common conceptual paradigm and operate as a key science-policy-practice interface. Wildness does not exclude human influence or activity but positions the autonomy of ecological systems and human domination of systems on opposite ends of a spectrum. However, conservation science, and public perception of conservation, is trapped by a false dichotomy between intrinsic and instrumental value (largely mirroring non-human and human value), which has produced perverse policy and socio-economic feedback. Conservation policy and assessments, mostly originating in the global north, are narrowly centred on intrinsic values of biodiversity and present negative framings through messages of ‘extinction risk’ and ‘wildlife decline’ that presents wildlife and wildness as fragile entities not to be disturbed by humans. Such framings hinder socio-economic value creation and alienate conservationists from the other major counterfactual land-use – agriculture. Wildness transcends this dichotomy by integrating the innate ecological processes of wildlife and functioning ecosystems (intrinsic value) into effects and services that generate both individual well-being and socio-economic returns (instrumental values). I map potential pathways of how wildness and rewilding connect conservation value to these various dimensions of societal value across scales, using both expert-elicitation data and empirical data from surveys of private wildlife managers in South Africa, and contextualise these pathways within the wildlife economy. Beginning at the broadest scale, I discuss the various definitions of wildness and rewilding and construct a definition that articulates their boundary dimensions between conservation and policy, psychology and spirituality, agriculture and economics. I then construct a conceptual model, based on a literature review of nature’s contributions to people and capability theory from the social sciences, which demonstrates the infinite value of wildness to individual well-being and psychological functioning, focussing on wildness as a process rather than a pattern or place. I then translate wildness as a process into potential policy design and decision-making tools. Using the South African policy context as a case study, whilst drawing on my experiences in compiling the 2016 national Red List of Mammals of South Africa, I design a framework to measure the wildness of privately managed wildlife populations as a step towards mainstreaming local-scale assessments of conservation value into national assessments and market-based incentives; and use this framework to inform a potential wildlife economy certification scheme. I then apply this framework to privately managed Bontebok Damaliscus pygargus pygargus subpopulations to assess the prevalence of ecologically functioning herds on private lands and the potential for these assessments to unlock economic value through lowering the technical barriers needed to demonstrate conservation enhancement under trophy hunting regulations. Collectively, these results demonstrate the extent of wildness of private ‘working lands’ in South Africa, driven by socioeconomic conditions, where biodiversity conservation is an outcome rather than a primary goal. Simultaneously, they demonstrate the limitation of current conservation legislation and regulations based on Global North aspirations and paradigms. As such, I then assess the potential for wildness and rewilding to interface with multilateral agreements that focus on land restoration and sustainable land management as well as national agricultural policies that seek to improve land productivity and ecosystem condition. Specifically, I assess the impacts of converting from cattle farming to wildlife-based land-uses (WBLUs) on vegetation productivity dynamics at a national scale compared to counterfactual land-uses (commercial livestock farming, communal rangelands and formally protected areas), where I find that the rewilding of indigenous herbivore species significantly improves residual grassy productivity over time and slows the rate of woody plant growth, demonstrating the efficacy of rewilding in combatting bush encroachment in African rangelands and enabling the development of inclusive, production-based enterprises. I also find that increases in vegetation productivity correlate with increased profitability of WBLUs as does the use of fire, which underscores the importance of rewilding programmes to include restoration of natural disturbance regimes. Considering that climate change is making many rangeland areas less and less suitable for livestock farming, these results corroborate previous studies and opinions that WBLUs are an ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change. Importantly, my results also suggest that WBLUs function as a nature-based solution for climate change in that restoring ecosystem functioning is likely to actively sequester carbon dioxide into soils, which I explore further in a literature review of the impacts of rewilding on soil carbon sequestration. Finally, using survey data from new market entrants to the wildlife economy, I investigate the barriers to wildlife economy enterprise development and find there is conflict between the environmental and agricultural mandates, both conceptually and operationally, and argue that a pragmatic view of wildness and wildlife is needed to start ‘rewilding the commons’. Taken together, I conclude that rewilding can be reframed as a tool to improve agricultural productivity and enhance the resilience of rural production landscapes by diversifying revenue streams, but that mixed farms (combining wildlife and cattle or cultivation) should be seen as a strategic novel ecosystem and not just a transitionary land-use to wildlife-only protected areas. Considering this study's results, several themes emerge from viewing wildness as a boundary object with implications for wildlife economy development in African rangelands. Firstly, I suggest conservationists move away from a paradigm of ‘protecting and preserving wildlife’ towards a recognition of wildness and wildlife as assets in working lands that should be deployed to achieve positive socio-economic and social-ecological outcomes. This requires a shift in thinking from the vertical, top-down approach (current normative species-level assessments and regulations) to a horizontal, bottom-up landscape approach based on rewilding as restoration in novel ecosystems and an understanding of socio-economic systems as drivers of rewilding. Secondly, linked to this, is the need to transcend assessments of conservation value through Global North tools like the Red List, OECMs and non-detriment findings (under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) to more proactive and locally relevant evaluations of wildness. The extension of ‘protected area thinking’ (species-level assessments, focus on static biodiversity features, emphasis on long-term legal guarantees) into working lands and commons is counterproductive in not understanding or recognising the drivers that lead to biodiversity conservation outcomes and feeds into public misinformation that in turn influences policy that negatively impacts sustainable use. Rather, seeing wildness and rewilding as inherently creative processes in novel ecosystems will free decision-makers to make more forward-looking policies and design market-based incentives that speak to impact investors. As such, thirdly, we must develop appropriate monitoring and evaluation frameworks to mobilise policy-relevant data. There is little evidence for the long-term impacts of rewilding on ecosystem and socio-economic system dynamics, and we lack fundamental information on the wildlife economy such as ‘what is it?’ (identification of viable business models and their impacts) and ‘where are they?’ (mapping the spatial extent of the sector and landscape-scale impacts), which leads to poor policy design as we cannot articulate the trade-offs or synergies between biodiversity, job creation and land productivity at multiple scales. Partnerships with private landowners are needed to document long-term dynamics, which must be facilitated through unlocking economic opportunities of wildlife. While the world is a significantly less wild place today than before the advent of neo-liberal market capitalism, restoring wildness, as a creative and unending process, provides hope that we can transition to ecological mindfulness and sustainable economic systems. “A ghost wilderness […] hovers around the entire planet,” wrote the poet Gary Snyder. It’s time for that ghost to guide us through the Anthropocene.