Lay Knowledge of Ecosystem Services in Rural Eastern Cape Province, South Africa: Implications for Intervention Program Planning

The ecosystem service concept is a new scientific construct that was coined to lay bare the contribution that nature makes to human well-being. Besides playing an epistemic role (expanding ecological knowledge), the concept is pedagogical in that it seeks to emphasize the need to conserve nature among resource managers and resource users. The growth of ecosystem service literature since the 1980s has been moved by a largely scientific debate that seeks to disambiguate ecological functions from services, develop appropriate resource accounting techniques and critique the concept as a neoliberal construct. Conclusions reached in these debates are used to guide intervention programs such as payment for ecosystem services (PES), but knowledge of the rural people on whose landscapes the programs are implemented seldom features in the debates. Local communities rely on lay ecological knowledge to interpret and interact with nature. The question we have in mind is thus: In the context of South Africa’s chequered history of racialized conservation and top-down development intervention programs, what is the likelihood of success of exclusively scientific ecosystem service programs? We pose this question while aware that the relationship between science and other knowledge systems is more complementary than dichotomous. However, some features make the two work differently from each other. We selected two villages of Mgwalana and Mahlungulu in Eastern Cape Province of South Africa to investigate lay knowledge of ecosystem services. We make an argument for implications of these findings on planning of intervention programs. We used a mixed methods approach that involved two rounds of data collection. The first was a quantitative survey with 33 respondents. The second round involved in-depth interviews with 17 respondents. The study found that lay people understand ecosystem services in significantly different ways to scientists. While they easily recognize provisional and cultural, lay people are not familiar with regulatory and supporting ecosystem services and classification of services into groups confuses them. Messages foregrounded in these findings have potential to both expand the ecosystem service knowledge and attract stakeholder cooperation in intervention programs.