On 8 and 9 February 2023, the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (CAS) hosted the Living Landscapes in Action (LLA) Impact Network Meeting at the Old College House, University of Pretoria (UP). LLA is a joint project, based at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape, and in partnership with Wageningen University and the University of Cape Town. The project is funded by the Oak Foundation. 

"The Living Landscape project aims to set up and develop an effective convivial conservation evidence campaign and coalition that builds the basis for a systemic redesign of the conservation sector in Southern Africa. Convivial Conservation is about combining the long-term care for biodiversity with social justice. It has been designed to overcome fundamental problems with mainstream forms of conservation in South Africa and globally: they ignore the colonial history of conservation, they separate people from biodiversity through an emphasis on fences and protected reserves; they embrace rather than challenge neoliberal economic models that maintain and often even worsen inequalities and injustices; and, ironically, they do all this while promoting forms of economic growth that disenfranchise people and worsen biodiversity loss."

 

More information on this project can be found on the PLAAS website.