Landscapes Heal When People Belong to Them

Did you know: People Living in Landscapes Nourish the Landscape

Like many other water catchments globally, high in the mountains of the Eastern Cape in South Africa, where mist drifts over old grasslands and water gathers itself into the first trickles of a river, the Umzimvubu takes its first breath. This is no ordinary river. It is the artery of a region, supporting agriculture, towns, ecosystems, and millions of lives downstream.

It is also the site of a quiet but significant shift.

Across the Upper Umzimvubu Catchment, communities, herders, traditional authorities, farmers, NGOs, scientists, and government partners have been working, often imperfectly, sometimes unevenly, towards restoring degraded landscapes and strengthening local stewardship to be an exemplar of sustainable rural economic development. No single project caused the change. No actor can credibly claim ownership. Yet change is visible and there were some leaders who catalysed the change. Many can claim leadership for their contribution to the change. 

This blog reflects on that change asking not “What caused success?” but “What plausibly contributed to the changes observed, given the context and complexity of the system?”

 

What Changed?

Observed Outcomes Rather Than Claimed Impacts

Success in the Upper Umzimvubu was due to a constellation of outcomes that emerged over time:

• Wetlands voluntarily secured and beginning to recover
  
• Coordinated grazing rotations across communal boundaries
  
• Youth-led invasive species clearing, water management, and rangeland restoration
  
• Traditional councils custodial roles
  
• Improved soil moisture and spring flows near homesteads
  
• Government and Non-profit Organisations resources enabling local agency priorities
  
• Growing pride, responsibility, and commitment to land stewardship
• Improved market access for communal farmers to prosper from their stewardship
  

These outcomes span ecological, economic, behavioural, social, and institutional domains. Crucially, they are not end states but signals of directional change and willingness, conditions that make long-term stewardship more plausible and unsustainable landscape alternatives less attractive. 

The core outcome is not “restoration achieved,” but enhanced collective capacity and resilience to manage the landscape towards their own ideal productive and healthy living landscape. 

 

Who Contributed?

Multiple Actors, Distributed, Emergent, but Coordinated Influence

In the Upper Umzimvubu, change emerged through distributed contributions:

• Umzimvubu Partnerships made sense of the complexity and agency needed to coordinate contribution of key actors in the landscape
• Non Profit Organizations catalysed change by providing funding, facilitation, training, monitoring, and adaptive support
• Traditional leaders lent legitimacy, cultural authority, and continuity
  
• Herders and farmers participated by altering daily practices that directly shape the land
  
• Youth groups injected labour, innovation, and future-oriented motivation
  
• Community champions bridged language, knowledge, and trust gaps
  
• Scientists contributed mapping, ecological assessments, and feedback loops
  
• Government partners aligned policies and funding with on-the-ground priorities
  
• Households and residents endorsed decisions and reinforced norms socially
• Private sector and Commercial actors facilitating access to markets inaccessible for communal farmers
  

While no single actor on their own was sufficient and each contribution mattered only in relation to the others, the Environmental and Rural Solutions organisation played a pivotal coordination and convening role in mobilising these actors in this landscape till a critical mass of actors were established to play their roles. 

 

How Did These Contributions Add Up?

Plausible Contribution Pathways

Rather than assuming linear causality, ask whether a credible explanation exists linking actions to outcomes.

In the Upper Umzimvubu, five reinforcing pathways offer explanation for how contributions accumulated into progression over time:

1. Relevance Across Livelihoods.

   Through higher participation and sustained engagement, restoration efforts were consistently linked to lived concerns like livestock health, water access, dignity, and local opportunity for economic prosperity. Did this increase uptake and reduce resistance? 

2. Multiple Motivations, One Direction.

   Through a broader coalition, diverse groups joined for different reasons, economic, cultural, ecological, or institutional, yet their actions aligned toward shared practices and outcomes.

3. Trust-Building Through Process.

   Through sustained engagement, reduced conflict, transparency, respect for local authority structures, and follow-through built confidence in partnerships. The cost was carried by many for all to benefit. 

4. Strategic Positioning for Support

   Through increased and better external expert and resources support, the work developed a recognisable identity, community-led, landscape-scale stewardship, attracting aligned resources and policy attention, particularly leading green economy rural economic development thinking. 

5. Internalisation of Practice

   Through greater durability beyond project cycles, over time, stewardship behaviours became socially reinforced rather than externally driven.

Why Context Mattered

Enabling and Constraining Conditions

The Upper Umzimvubu Catchment sits in the Eastern Cape Province Matatiele region, one of South Africa’s most important Strategic Water Source Areas south of Lesotho. It is shaped by:

• High-altitude grasslands critical to national water security
  
• Low Rural Economic Development and deep rural poverty and historical and current economic marginalisation
  
• Fragmented grazing governance
  
• Heavy reliance on livestock and natural resources
  
• Increasing climate variability
  
• Disrupted traditional stewardship systems
  

This microcosm is representative of much of the development challenges in rural South Africa but also the opportunity to show how sustainable economic development can provide a prosperous future. Context is not background. It is a causal factor.

 

What This Suggests for South Africa

Learning Without Overclaiming

The Upper Umzimvubu experience does not prove that landscape restoration will succeed elsewhere. What it offers is something more honest and useful. A plausible, evidence-informed account of how collective and coordinated action can contribute to ecological resilience in critical green economy landscapes.

The lesson is not that projects save landscapes, but that aligned contributions, grounded in lived realities, can shift trajectories.

For Public, Non-Profit, and Private sector practitioners, the implications are:

• Focus less on claiming impact but claim your contribution in how it has progressed change, recognised and celebrated by all
  
• Success is building and strengthening relationships, legitimacy, and local agency of the communities who will steward the landscape for generations to come
  
• Track contribution pathways, not just outputs
  
• Accept uncertainty, and build credibility through learning and resilience, and have your supporters enable this critical competency
  

When people living in landscapes contribute meaningfully to their care, the landscape responds, not immediately, not perfectly, but visibly through people's actions. And sometimes, that is enough for a fundamental progression towards change.

Disclaimer: This blog is a strategic reflection on the work done by remarkable leaders in South Africa navigating wicked problem contexts. It is not the work of Telos Terra. It is a recognition of what normative change solutions look like. The intention of this opinion piece is to support think tanks to question, explore, develop, and rehearse alternative ways to solve stuck, persistent, problems on the journey to achieving normative goal change.