​The South African Research Chair (SARChI) in the Sociology of Land, Environment and Sustainable Development, launched in January 2016, addresses a set of intersecting questions around the meanings and practices of sustainable development across local, national, and global scales.

The arid Karoo region of South Africa is its primary research site, hence it is called the “'Cosmopolitan Karoo". Covering nearly a third of South Africa and over a third of the country's agricultural land, yet home to less than 2% of the national population (the latter concentrated in scattered, generally struggling small towns), this marginalised area has entered a period of significant social and ecological change.

In a recent lead article for a “Karoo special issue" of the African Journal of Range & Forage Science, Prof Cherryl Walker and her co-authors identified climate change, weak governance and significant land-use changes as key drivers of change. Major new land-uses include growing numbers of renewable energy projects, both wind and solar; the continued interest in the potential of shale-gas mining (“fracking") across large swathes of the central Karoo; and astronomy, notably the Square Kilometre Array radio telescope (SKA) and the optical Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). In order to protect South Africa's investment in astronomy as a national research priority area, the whole of the Northern Cape, bar the Kimberley district, has been declared an “astronomy advantage area".

Approximately 130 000 hectares of former sheep farmland around the SKA's core site are being designated a “special nature reserve", accessible for scientific research purposes only.

These externally driven investments are repositioning the Karoo within the larger political economy of South Africa but also bringing very different ways of understanding “development" into an often tense encounter. Here a major research theme concerns external ways of understanding the Karoo as essentially an empty space, ripe for future development for the greater good, versus local ways of understanding the Karoo as a deeply social place, with unresolved claims for redress stemming from its divided past. This raises challenging questions around politics of scale in setting the agenda for sustainable development in post-apartheid South Africa and beyond.

There are no simple answers to what are not simple questions, but this chair aims to contribute to the development of both appropriate questions and more robust answers, through its programme of theoretically informed, empirically grounded and inter-disciplinary research.​

*The article appears in the latest edition of the Stellenbosch University Research Publication. Click hereto read more. 

Photograph: Stock image – Unsplash