Call for Papers: Living Landscapes: Nature, Conservation and Rural Livelihoods in the Karoo

23-10-2026

New Agenda Special Issue

Living Landscapes: Nature, Conservation and Rural Livelihoods in the Karoo

Guest editor:

Dr Stephanie Borchardt, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University, sborchardt@sun.ac.za 

The Karoo is one of the world’s most biodiverse arid regions. Its extraordinary succulent flora includes species found nowhere else on Earth. Its landscapes are also home to farmers, farmworkers, small towns and communal land users. Yet the Karoo is often portrayed as empty. This image overlooks both its ecological richness and the people whose lives and livelihoods are tied to the land.

Conservation is becoming an increasingly visible part of the Karoo landscape. Private reserves bring farms under new forms of ownership and management. Spekboom is planted for ecological restoration and carbon credits. Biodiversity corridors seek to connect fragmented landscapes. Meanwhile, rare succulents are illegally harvested from the veld and trafficked to international collectors. These developments raise important questions about how nature is valued, who gets to protect it, and what conservation means for the people and places involved.

Conservation is about more than protecting species and landscapes. It also involves decisions about land, livelihoods, knowledge and the future of rural communities. Its history and practice are shaped by ecological change, land ownership, local institutions and different understandings of nature. These relationships can create opportunities for restoration and stewardship, but they can also generate difficult questions about access, participation and competing priorities.

This special issue of New Agenda invites contributions that explore the changing relationships between nature, conservation and rural livelihoods in the Karoo. How is conservation practised and governed? What happens when biodiversity protection intersects with land use and local livelihoods? Whose knowledge shapes conservation priorities, and how are its benefits and responsibilities shared?

We welcome interdisciplinary and empirically grounded contributions from researchers, conservation practitioners, NGOs, land managers, community organisations, artists, and others working in the region. We are interested in diverse perspectives on the challenges, tensions, and competing priorities and interests that shape conservation, and on how more socially just and ecologically sustainable futures might be imagined for the Karoo.

Potential themes include, but are not limited to:

  • Succulent poaching and biodiversity crime: Illegal harvesting, trafficking networks, enforcement, and the ecological, cultural and commercial value of rare and endemic plants.
  • Restoration, carbon economies and biodiversity corridors: Spekboom restoration, carbon credits, land degradation, rewilding, ecological connectivity, and the social and economic implications of reshaping landscapes for conservation.
  • Community engagement, livelihoods and just conservation: Participation, local agency and resistance, land access, employment, resource use, and the distribution of conservation benefits and costs.
  • Conservation governance, policy and environmental assessment: Land tenure, biodiversity policy, institutional relationships, environmental impact assessments, specialist studies and public participation, including tensions between private, communal and state actors.
  • Knowledge, memory and representations of the Karoo: Indigenous, oral and artistic knowledge, historical land regimes, colonialism and dispossession, farming and pastoral histories, and the ways different understandings of nature shape conservation.
  • Conservation, land use and rural change: The relationships between conservation, agriculture, renewable energy and other land uses, including their implications for rural livelihoods, landscapes and competing visions for the Karoo.

We also welcome contributions on related themes, including human wildlife interaction, conservation labour, the role of NGOs and private conservation organisations, biodiversity monitoring, environmental education, ecological knowledge and practice, and the relationships between conservation, agriculture, renewable energy and other forms of land use.

Submission details

Please submit an extended abstract of 300 to 500 words, a working title, and a short author biography (up to 100 words) to sborchardt@sun.ac.za by 29 January 2027.

Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by 19 February 2027 and invited to submit a full manuscript by 13 August 2027.

Articles should be between 3,000 and 5,000 words, and authors are encouraged to write in a style that is accessible, engaging, and suitable for a broader audience.

All article submissions will undergo the journal's standard peer review process.

We also welcome commentary pieces and book reviews. Contributors are encouraged to get in touch with the guest editor to discuss their proposed contribution.

About the journal

New Agenda: South African Journal of Social and Economic Policy is a peer reviewed, open access policy journal published by the Institute for African Alternatives (IFAA) in partnership with the Institute for Social Development (ISD) at the University of the Western Cape.