Exploring change agent strategies in navigating transformation towards safe and just agri-food systems in South Africa - A case study of the SPAR Rural hub project

Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) champions the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services to help people adapt to the adverse effects of climate change. Moreover, EbA presents an exemplary opportunity to confer social-ecological resilience. But how can such initiatives be effectively implemented and managed towards a resilient supply of key ecosystem services? Through case study research on community-led water sow and harvest (WSH) – a traditional form of EbA in the Peruvian Andes – this thesis explores social-ecological conditions for self-organization, collaboration and learning for the adoption of the practice, as well as the emergence of adaptive co-management (ACM) and its potential for building local water resilience. Qualitative data collected from interviews and participatory observations were thematically coded, and analysed for self-organization using the Multilevel Nested Framework (Ostrom 2009) and subsequently for social learning using ACM literature. This study found that self-organization for the adoption of WSH was primarily influenced by strong leadership, the importance of the water resource to the community, and users bonded by formal institutions of collective choice and social norms rooted in Andean culture. In addition, four types of collaboration and five learning activities were found to conform a social learning process and result in social learning outcomes for enhanced adaptive capacity, indicating the emergence of ACM around community-led WSH. By supporting knowledge exchange through a social network, ACM allows the practice to be scaled-up to create enabling legislation, scaled-out to increase the number of communities adopting WSH, and scaleddeep to support cultural internalization of the practice. Such scaling can potentially enable community-led WSH to build local water resilience through: 1) implementation at the landscape level to match the scale of ecological processes that sustain water ecosystem services; and 2) continuous management over time to support adaptive forms of water resource governance in the face of change and uncertainty