Few studies have assessed the relationships between land-cover change and socio-economic factors at a local level in the former bantustans of South Africa (also referred to as 'homelands'). These areas are home to approximately 2.4 million rural households (Statistics South Africa 1999), who still depend heavily on the land and its natural resources for their livelihoods (Statistics South Africa 1999; Shackleton and Shackleton 2004). The economic and social values of land-based strategies to rural livelihoods in South Africa, including natural resource harvesting, have not been fully appreciated by policymakers, especially with regard to direct provisioning and as part of the 'rural safety net' (Cousins 1999; Shackleton et al. 2001; Shackleton and Shackleton 2004).
The former bantustans have typically been characterized as severely degraded due to overgrazing and overharvesting of resources, often using commercial cattle ranches as benchmarks for comparison (De Wet 1987; Boonzaier et al. 1990). However, the notion of communal rangelands being irreparably damaged has been challenged by some authors (Shackleton 1993; Harrison and Shackleton 1999; Critchley and Netshikovhela 1998). Where high levels of environmental degradation have been demonstrated, these have been associated with a combination of particular biophysical factors (e.g. steep slopes and high mean annual temperatures) and socio-economic characteristics (e.g. high human densities and high reliance of the population on a few wage-earners) (Hoffman and Todd 2000). Moreover, the use of commercial farms as the reference point in assessing communal lands is contestable, as communal areas are multiple-use landscapes, shaped and transformed by a range of interacting environmental and human factors (Batterbury 2001; Twine 2005), where economic goals may be secondary in influencing resource management strategies such as animal husbandry (Everson and Hatch 1999; Dovie et al. 2006). They are, therefore, intrinsically different systems to single-use economic landscapes such as commercial farms.
As such, the bantustan landscapes exhibit features common to cultural landscapes. Farina (2000) defines cultural landscapes as 'geographic areas in which the relationships between human activities and the environment have created ecological, socio-economic and cultural patterns and feedback mechanisms'. Human disturbances are varied and occur simultaneously at different intensities and spatial and temporal scales, giving rise to a 'network of interactions between resources and users, shaping a diversified natural, cultural and economic mosaic' in a heterogeneous landscape (Farina 2000). In this context, we suggest that the former bantustans can be regarded as modern cultural landscapes.
Cultural landscapes are clearly an example of social-ecological systems, which are 'ecological system[s] intricately linked with and affected by one or more social systems' (Anderies et al. 2004). Social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems characterized by cross-scale interactions and feedback loops between ecological and socio-economic components, often resulting in re-organization of these components and nonlinear trajectories of change (Berkes and Folke 1998; Folke 2006; Walker et al. 2006). Resilience is a key property of cultural landscapes and other social-ecological systems, and can be defined as the capacity of the system to withstand or recover from shocks through self-organization and adaptation (Berkes and Folke 1998; Farina 2000; Carpenter et al. 2001; Folke 2006; Smit and Wandel 2006; Walker et al. 2006).
If we assume that the former bantustans are cultural landscapes, we expect to find complex cross scale interactions and feedback loops between the rural communities and the surrounding communal lands, giving rise to heterogeneous landscape mosaics. We also expect to find examples of resilience and adaptation in the system. Importantly, these rural communities are undergoing rapid social, political, economic and cultural transitions, which directly and indirectly influence the way society interacts with the environment, which in turn can cause rapid environmental change (Twine 2005). This has potentially important implications for resilience and sustainability of the former bantustans as social-ecological systems.
This paper focuses on some of the links between environmental change and socio-economic factors in a former bantustan region of South Africa, using cultural landscapes and social-ecological systems as the theoretical framework. We undertook an historical analysis of associations between village-level socio-economic factors, household livelihood strategies, and land-cover change in a former bantustan region over a period of 23 years, from 1974 to 1997. The study addressed three research questions: What are the patterns of land-cover change in a former bantustan region of South Africa? What are the associations between land-cover change and local socio-economic factors at different scales in a former bantustan cultural landscape? Do trends in land-cover change and socio-economic factors promote resilience in these social-ecological systems?
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