Authors: Melissa Mchale and David Bunn

Article Title: IMAGINE - Developing science that contributes to the health and well being of communities in-need.

Authors: Melissa McHale and David Bunn

Email: [email protected] [email protected]

Lead Sentence: IMAGINE is a new international collaboration that aims to establish a long-term socio-ecological framework for comparative research in the greater Kruger National Park region.

What is IMAGINE?

One bright autumn morning, a group of South African and American graduate students gathered nervously before a community forum leader in the Bushbuckridge region. They had been up late preparing and were about to learn how difficult it is to communicate science in a way that matters. They each took turns, stumbling over buzz phrases, and realizing a bit too late that they may have underestimated the language barrier. Socio- ecological systems research continued to be harder than they could ever imagine.

But in spite of all the challenges, a small group of women and children who initially sequestered themselves on the outer edges of the group, shyly moved closer and closer to the feedback session. They leaned inward to see the hand-drawn graphs held up by the students, who fought to keep each body-sized page from flapping too much in the gentle morning breeze.

When the session was complete, an uncomfortable silence reigned, but only until the extended family realized the students were done. Then they gathered around the large painted charts, enthusiastically jabbing at them. Wayne Twine, turned with a smile to me and said, “People are discussing the results. They are surprised at how many in the village are dependent on firewood.” And at that moment I finally exhaled, realizing the entire time I may have been holding my breath, more nervous for the students than they were themselves. 2

Figure 1: A Bushbuckridge family displaying the results.

IMAGINE is an acronym that stands for International Mentoring of Advanced Graduates for INterdisciplinary Excellence. This year we inaugurated IMAGINE with a month-long graduate training program in socio-ecological systems [SES] research for South African and American students. Bushbuckridge was the second pilot study the students worked on during the program. Students were engaged in all phases of developing a research project on human livelihoods and resource use, from understanding the literature and past research outcomes, to developing research questions and implementing a household survey in one neighborhood for several days, to analyzing the dataset and, as described above, presenting relevant results in an understandable way to the community.

Two Pilot Sites The livelihoods study in Bushbuckridge was one of many challenges faced by the students and faculty on this program. One of the main goals for IMAGINE is to develop a comparative framework for understanding challenges faced by stressed communities in the complex, greater Kruger National Park socio-ecological system. To this end, we began our journey in Skukuza, in the Kruger Park, introducing advanced students to the basics of savanna ecology, and discussing some of the most controversial environmental challenges faced by scientists and managers of the protected area.

Not surprisingly, questions around fire, water, elephant management, and transboundary systems dominated the conversation in these early days. However, through discussion around the scientific literature, students learned that these ecological issues are highly complex in nature, and in the end not just ecological. At their core they are a function of the social system itself. Furthermore, the challenge is to think both comparatively and historically: fire, for example, in this new understanding is a critical ecosystem driver, but its effects vary in relation to distinct epochs of human control and landscape management policy. 3

Our next destination after Skukuza was in Limpopo Province. HaMakuya, in the Vhembe district, is a community located close to the South Africa/Zimbabwe Border and to Makuya Park, a provincial protected area abutting onto Kruger. Several of the faculty members in the IMAGINE program have worked here for years, and this was an obvious choice for our second pilot study site. Upon arrival, it was already evident to the group how the rainfall gradient--with declining annual precipitation as you move northward through Kruger--has an influence on the ecosystem. Students started their experience in homestays, where they spent three days and two nights living with family members in a baVenda household. During that time, they did everything the members of the community do daily--including, to the despair of vegetarians, killing and preparing a chicken for dinner.

This initial exercise may seem like an opportunity only for privileged urbanites who have never seen a rural village. On the contrary, however, the Hamakuya homestay experience has turned out to be a sophisticated instrument: it has been utilized in many recent academic programs, and even the most experienced South African students, whether from Sandton, Cato Manor, or Mamelodi, say that it was a key part of their learning. It is one thing to see how other people live; it is quite another to actually spend time feeling the texture of everyday rural life, with its resource and energy demands. Overall, the intimacy that developed between the students, the homestay household, and the surrounding village, was integral for researchers to gain an understanding of the real questions one should ask when engaging people in conversation about their lives.

The homestay experience was also central to boosting students’ confidence in achieving a successful research project. It was in this setting that the students were able to learn how to use observational field methods, as well as implement a preliminary test of their intended research project. And because of that, their focus-group session a few days later was a complete success. Dividing community members into groups chosen according to gender and age, we engaged in a complicated form of asset mapping. In the process, we learned about the features in the surrounding villages that are most valued by its residents, and began to understand especially the complexities around water availability and quality.

Thinking back on these events, it is clear that without the prior discussion of scientific papers, the small-group, asset mapping exercises, and the homestays, researchers might very well have misunderstood the statements expressed in a later, larger feedback session. The nuanced landscape maps of Tshiandzwane, Guyuni, and Masunda villages, drawn by young men and young women, for instance, reflected an asymmetrically gendered investment in resources and resource futures that was disguised in the more public forum. Older men tended to dominate the discussion in the wider forum.

What was also astonishing to researchers was the discovery of patterns of need and municipal mismanagement across all the villages we visited at all sites. Not a single one of the communities we visited along the border of the Kruger National Park could access water from their community taps while we were there. This affected every aspect of rural 4 development as well. The very motivated and well-organized Mnisi community project near Orpen gate, for instance, has had more than R12 million in government job creation funding poured into it, and yet at the heart of their new tourist venture there is an Olympic-sized swimming pool standing empty and cracking, without the hope of water to fill it.

Inventing, Discussing, Imagining IMAGINE is much more than a simple training program for graduate students, and our students this semester were able to participate in the overall development of the broader initiative. We spent days in a workshop with key individuals from South African National Parks, North Carolina State University, the University of Pretoria, the University of the Witwatersrand Rural Facility, and the Organization of Tropical Studies, outlining our main goals for a program that we hope will lead to the development of a long-term socio-ecological research network in the region.

These meetings brought together leading savanna ecologists, urban ecologists, and social scientists, some with an initial measure of skepticism about the transdisciplinary project, but all with a willingness to try innovative forms of collaboration. We began with only a few agreed-upon principles, and in two successive workshops, over several days, we determined the programs’ mission:

To establish a trans-disciplinary research and education program that contributes to the sustainability and resilience of the greater Kruger National Park socio-ecological system. Through co-learning and benefit- sharing we will develop research that enhances the well-being of people living in the region. Our collaborative research network will expand comparative understanding of complex socio-ecological systems located along a rural-urban gradient.

Our main goals are to: 1. build a graduate training program in socio-ecological systems research; 2. achieve co-learning via research and education; 3. contribute to resilience and sustainability of the SES; 4. create a global reputation for Socio-Ecological Systems Research; 5. evaluate and assess all goals, objectives and outcomes using the strategic adaptive management framework.

It is worth noting that the statement of IMAGINE goals arrived at after the workshops reflects a consensus across a wide variety of professional fields. Those who contributed to the debate came from all walks of professional life: from ecology, policy, phytoremediation, forestry, biotech, tourism, psychology, mathematics, hydrology, GIS, conservation biology, and cultural anthropology, to name but a few.

Rural, Urban…”Rural-Urban”? One of the main armatures of the new research network is a body of theory associated with Socio Ecological Systems. While other areas of overlap exist (an interest in complexity, and in sustainability, for instance), an interdisciplinary understanding of SES unites many of the research programs associated with IMAGINE. 5

Ecological and cultural systems in South Africa are at serious risk of degradation and challenged by a growing population in long-term economic crisis, with some of the highest unemployment and HIV infection rates in the world. Shifts in social values, increasingly consumptive lifestyles, land use change, resource exploitation, the failure of service delivery, and a changing climate are just several examples from a growing list of threats to the integrity of these complex Socio-Ecological Systems (SES). Furthermore, global sustainability is dependent on these communities as they transition into increasingly urbanized and exploitative lifestyles. IMAGINE believes that there is much to learn from the communities to the west of Kruger, and much that they can teach about urbanizing futures everywhere.

To understand global patterns from these border instances, however, we need a new understanding of the rural-urban gradient, of the rural in the urban, and vise versa. To do that, we have to think out of the box: IMAGINE draws some of its research inspiration from the social sciences, from the study of flexible, extended households in Africa, for instance; it combines this with understanding derived from the innovative ULTRA [Urban Long Term Research Area] programs in the United States. The latter are aimed at helping teams of scientists and practitioners “to conduct interdisciplinary research on the dynamic interactions between people and natural ecosystems in urban settings in ways that will advance both fundamental and applied knowledge” [www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09551/nsf09551.htm].

Small Steps Thus far we have spoken about some large goals, but we realize to achieve them we must take a series of significant small steps so we can actually maintain this program for the long term (Figure 2). 6

Figure 2: The IMAGINE flower has five petals representing our main goals in which we have organized some of our overlapping objectives for the long and short term.

We also need to begin to engage more of the scientists doing our kind of work in the region. One of the reasons we picked this area for implementing IMAGINE was because of the presence of truly innovative, ongoing projects in both the ecological and social sciences.

Some precedents for this kind of work have been established by programs like the IUCN's TPARI forum; TreeHouse (the UKZN-University of Montana collaboration); INSAKA (on benefit sharing); LiveDiverse; the Italian funded CESVI group (looking at transboundary resource use); AHEAD (focusing on the GLTFCA); Wits Rural; the Organization for Tropical Studies undergraduate program; AWARD (on wetlands and wetland governance); and of course SANParks itself.

One of the most exhilarating aspects of our discussions has been the sense that we are giving substance to the newly defined socio-ecological horizon for SANParks’ Adaptive Management policy. At the heart of that policy is the goal of achieving real partnerships and new constituencies for conservation. There were moments in this inaugural IMAGINE program when we caught glimpses of that goal. Look back at the photograph which heads this informal report and you will see family members posing with the charts and graphs produced by student researchers. Look a little more closely though, and you will see an older matriarch holding up an example of her own productivity: a dish of the 7 delicious, peanut and maize-based cake offered to visitors. It is tempting to say that in the context of co-learning, a context which IMAGINE hopes to encourage, all these offerings and bits of evidence should be given equal weight.

Interested in IMAGINE? For more information on IMAGINE check out our new wiki site: http://urbanecologylab.wikispaces.com/IMAGINE