Nurturing Adaptive Governance Through Environmental Monitoring: People, Practices, Politics in the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region, South Africa

Adaptive governance is an approach that can potentially help societies navigate uncertainty, change, and surprise, as well as issues that span sectors and scales. In this chapter, we use this concept to refer to flexible and learning-based collaborations and decision-making processes involving both state and non-state actors, with the aim to adaptively negotiate and coordinate management of social-ecological issues. We identify critical questions in the adaptive governance literature and provide an empirical contribution to these. We draw on a case study of the Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region in South Africa, focusing on the people, practices, and politics involved with adaptive governance in the Global South. Our findings illustrate that the practices of generating knowledge, sharing information, collaborating, and responding to change are shaped by the navigation of tensions between diverse values, norms, and routines. A lens of people, practices, and politics highlights adaptive governance as situated and involving agency, meaning, and creativity.