TOWARDS BALANCING PRODUCTION AND PROTECTION PARTICIPATORY LANDSCAPE PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT IN KWAZULU-NATAL, SOUTH AFRICA

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceIn order to achieve biodiversity conservation and agricultural production goals at the same time and in the same space, there is a need to assess the functioning of rural land at the landscape level. This paper reports on the outcome of a landscape performance assessment in northern KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. Performance assessment is a way of keeping track of the status of a particular landscape and is useful for planners and other stakeholders when deciding which goals to pursue for improving the landscape's performance. We facilitated three group meetings for farmers and a fourth one for practitioners from key stakeholder institutions operating in the community. The landscape was rated on four aspects, namely conservation, production, livelihood and institutions goals. The overall mean rating was 2.97 out of a maximum rating of 5 implying that the landscape was generally performing fairly well. For various reasons however, the mean ratings for individual goals and sub-goals varied, both between and within stakeholder groups. We found the area to be an informal ecoagriculture landscape with a good potential for transformation into formal landscape-level management processes involving farmers and other stakeholders to support more ecosystem services and better living standards for its inhabitants