Innovating Environmental Governance through Critical Zone Thinking: Lessons from the Global South

The HSRC’s policy study component of the CZA project is anchored on the wide acknowledgement of the importance of building habitable futures by including bio-geophysical aspects of place in local governance. CZ thinking-informed policy practices are particularly relevant in African contexts, where livelihoods are closely tied to the geophysical ecosystem and climate variability. In these contexts, CZ approaches provide a powerful approach to informing policy innovations that are knowledge-plural and contextualized within lived realities. 

To date, this in-progress study of policy in specific places provides evidence that policy development and implementation activities continue to ignore the complex interaction of  societal practices, institutional arrangements, and biophysical processes. Drawing on foundational CZ literature and an analysis of selected site policies and data from science-policy-societal engagements conducted in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, the study demonstrates how environmental policy practices continue to be narrowly shaped by fragmented, sector-based governance frameworks and profit-oriented thinking, in which financialised relations, historical legacies, and knowledge hierarchies shape whose voices are included in policy processes.  This narrow framing leads to policy interventions that compromise the biogeophysical ecosystems resulting in problems such as material flows that lead to contamination and loss of wetlands and hydrological cycles (Tanzania’s Rufiji Delta, Zimbabwe’s Lake Chivero and the Cape Flats in South Africa); as well as soil quality degradation and loss (Ethiopia’s Central Rift Valley and Malingunde in Malawi). Over time, these non-inclusive policies create a feedback loop in which degraded ecosystems  have limited adaptive capacity and future livelihoods and habilitability are  compromised.  What this study shows is that land use land cover change is not simply due to ‘humans’, as so much of the LULC literature suggests, but that specific macroeconomic policies and approaches to local governance, which pay little attention to biogeophysical relations with society, have a significant responsibility – and therefore also the potential to make a difference.

The presentation argues for policy process innovations that transcend discipline boundaries between society, economy and biogepphysical relations, integrating different knowledge systems and adopt adaptive approaches capable of responding to uncertainty and long-term change. Where co-creative and  collaborative policy development  and implementation practices bring together scientists, policymakers, and communities as co-producers of knowledge, there is  potential for improved governance that builds habitable futures. By foregrounding knowledge plurality in policy as a tool, this presentation contributes to the session’s focus on international innovation and collaboration, and demonstrates how critical zone science can meaningfully inform local governance and policy across varied regional contexts.