Koedoe Special Issue: Towards Just and Sustainable Mega Living Landscapes

South African National Parks’ Vision 2040 places Mega Living Landscapes at the heart of its future strategy: vast, interconnected, multi-functional landscapes where biodiversity conservation, human well-being, heritage, and livelihoods are woven together. This represents a bold reimagining of conservation in South Africa, situating protected areas as facilitators of biodiversity protection in diverse, multifunctional social-ecological landscapes that are ecologically resilient, socially just, and economically viable. Mega Living Landscapes thus represent more than a new conservation strategy: they are central to the country’s broader economy, rural livelihoods, and redress of historical land injustices, offering a pathway to re-link land, people, and economic opportunity, while simultaneously managing risks to nature and society in the face of climate change, ecological degradation, and other emerging pressures.

This vision requires an approach that explicitly considers the connections and feedbacks between people, ecosystems, and governance institutions, recognising that resilience and sustainability depend on how these elements interact across scales. Vision 2040 thus requires new forms of thinking, partnerships, and experimentation, but it does not emerge from a blank slate. It builds on decades of innovation within South Africa’s national parks and surrounding landscapes – from Strategic Adaptive Management and pioneering co-management arrangements, land restitution agreements, cultural landscape governance, and benefit-sharing initiatives. These experiences provide a rich foundation of lessons, relationships, and institutional memory that can help shape just and sustainable Mega Living Landscapes. At the same time, extending these approaches to broader, more complex landscapes will bring new risks and trade-offs, demanding careful navigation of governance, equity, and capacity challenges.

Purpose of the Special Issue

Building on and expanding its legacy as a practitioner-focused, place-based, social-ecological conservation journal, Koedoe invites contributions to a special issue that explores how Vision 2040 and Mega Living Landscapes can be brought to life in practice. Koedoe: African Protected Area Conservation and Science has been one of the top open access journals in research on the conservation of natural and cultural assets in protected areas in Africa, since 1958. This issue aims to showcase Koedoe’s expanding focus on these issues, and provide knowledge that is directly relevant to diverse practitioners, ranging from park managers, conservation leaders, community leaders, landholders, NGOs, policymakers, scientists, and private sector partners engaged in shaping these broad landscapes beyond the fences of formal protected areas.

We seek contributions that can support the translation of the ambition of Vision 2040 into real-world strategies, drawing on lessons from SANParks’ legacy of innovation, lessons from other multi-functional landscapes (from Southern Africa and beyond), exploring and interrogating new kinds of partnerships and land uses that Mega Living Landscapes demand, and critically engaging with the risks, trade-offs, and opportunities this entails. Of particular interest are papers that illuminate the social-ecological feedbacks at play in these landscapes, and that help practitioners understand how to balance biodiversity, equity, livelihoods, and resilience under conditions of rapid change.

This special issue is an initiative of the Southern African Hub of the Society for Social-Ecological Systems (SocSES), and represents a commitment to strengthening place-based, practitioner-engaged scholarship in the region. By anchoring this work in Koedoe, the issue highlights the importance of social-ecological research that is rooted in context and responsive to practice. In this sense, the issue demonstrates how collaborative, practice-oriented publishing can advance both the field of SES research and the goals of SANParks’ Vision 2040.

Themes and topics

Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• Monitoring, feedbacks, and adaptive learning in social-ecological systems, including tools, indicators, and practitioner learning networks
• Ecological connectivity, biodiversity persistence, social justice, and climate resilience across multifunctional land- and seascapes
• Land restitution, equity, heritage, and redress in conservation landscapes, and their implications for social-ecological resilience
• Governance innovations: partnerships, co-management, polycentric arrangements, and inclusive participation across sectors
• Livelihoods, the bioeconomy, and sustainable resource use, with attention to social-ecological trade-offs and synergies
• Transforming South Africa’s economy through landscapes: exploring how Mega Living Landscapes can re-link land, people, and production systems; create sustainable jobs; and support structural economic transformation in rural and urban areas
• Scaling the biodiversity economy within a broader economic transition: opportunities and risks in positioning biodiversity, heritage, and ecosystem services as engines of inclusive growth, while managing trade-offs with other sectors
• Cultural landscapes, Indigenous and local knowledge systems, and their role in sustaining biodiversity and community well-being
• Policy frameworks, barriers and enabling conditions related to OECMs, 30×30 targets, and alignment with biodiversity and climate policies
• Financing innovation for social-ecological landscapes: green bonds, biodiversity credits, blended finance, and incentive systems
• Navigating risks and trade-offs: climate change, ecological thresholds, land-use conflicts, capacity constraints, and justice and equity concerns in Mega Living Landscapes and within SANParks
• Lessons from other multifunctional landscapes, in Southern Africa and globally, that can inform just and sustainable Mega Living Landscapes
• SANParks’ heritage of innovation and learning, and how decades of experimentation (e.g. Strategic Adaptive Management, Adaptive Governance) can inform future practice
• Seeds of change in existing land- and seascapes: identifying initiatives, partnerships, or community innovations that could support just and sustainable Mega Living Landscapes
• Capacity, knowledge integration, and institutional memory, including practitioner learning, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and transdisciplinary approaches
• Whose Vision 2040? Engaging critiques and power dynamics of and within Mega Living Landscapes

Article types

We welcome a wide range of contributions, in line with Koedoe’s submission guidelines:

• Original Research Articles (7000 words) – empirical studies or systematic reviews of ecological, social, or integrated dynamics
• Essays / Perspectives (3000 words) – conceptual, reflective, or policy-oriented pieces, including lessons from practice and history
• Short Communications (3000 words) – rapid insights, innovative methods, pilot projects, or emerging partnerships
• Checklists / Baseline Inventories (3000 words) – species lists, ecosystem surveys, cultural/heritage resources, or monitoring baselines relevant to Vision 2040

Who should contribute?

We invite contributions from ecologists, social scientists, and transdisciplinary researchers, as well as practitioners: academics, researchers, SANParks staff, NGOs, community leaders, land managers, policy-makers, and private sector actors. This breadth reflects the reality that Mega Living Landscapes demand collaboration across multiple land uses, sectors, and knowledge systems.

We recognise that many practitioners have valuable insights, experiences, and case studies that may not easily translate into a full academic article. To support practitioner voices, the Expression of Interest process will create space for:

• Practitioners to express interest if they have a story, case, or idea they would like to share but would prefer to collaborate with an academic partner on writing it up.
• Research teams to indicate their openness to co-authoring with practitioners, so that lived experience and applied knowledge are reflected alongside academic analysis.
• Shorter formats (such as essays, reflections, or short communications) for individual practitioner contributions that don’t require a full research paper structure.

This approach ensures that the special issue reflects the diversity of voices, experiences, and knowledge systems shaping South Africa’s Mega Living Landscapes.

Next steps and important dates:

• Friday, 6 March 2026 – Due date for submission of Expression of Interest (title and abstract)
• Friday, 20 March 2026 – Invitations to submit full manuscripts sent out
• February 2027 – Submission of full manuscripts
• June 2027 – Publication of Special Issue

For more information, or to share this call for contribution with others, see the brochure available here.

Complete the online application form here by Friday, 6 March 2026.

Any questions?

If you have any questions about this call or the application process, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at info@soces.org.