Adrian Nel
Biographic Data
| ID | 347905 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Adrian Nel |
| GIVEN NAMES | Adrian |
| FAMILY NAME | Nel |
| SIGNATURE | NEL A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of KwaZulu-Natal |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5924-9084 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 72 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Maps are now our spears: Participatory digital counter-mapping Xolobeni, South Africa
In Mpondoland on South Africa’s ‘Wild Coast’ the Amadiba people of Umgungundlovu (Xolobeni) have fought imposed ‘development’ projects since colonial times. In addition to longstanding efforts to mine the titanium-rich sand dunes, the Amadiba people have successfully resisted seismic testing for oil and gas in their coastal waters, and continue to struggle against mass tourism, industrial cannabis production, and a so-called ‘smart city.’ Foremos…
Taking a back seat: The politicization of municipal environmental governance in South Africa
Local government (LG) in South Africa (SA) is mandated to provide adequate service delivery and to ensure environmental protection within municipal boundaries. Local Environmental Governance (EG) is influenced by the actions of municipal councils and political leadership, resulting in politicized local EG. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has been gradually losing political power since 1994, and corruption and unprofessionalism in…
Doctoral Thesis Review – Anmeldelse av doktoravhandling
Ritah Kigonya sets out to investigate biodiversity offsetting as a framework for achieving ‘no net loss of biodiversity’ by compensating for biodiversity loss in one place through enhancing it in a
Alter-nation? Factions, Coalitions and Environmental Governance in the Context of Contested Post-apartheid Local State Democratisation
Many African states have become electoral democracies, but others are still run by electoral authoritarian regimes, and/or exhibit procedural but not more substantive emancipatory extensions of rights and functions. In such contexts, alternation of power, or electoral turnover, has been recognised as a key signifier of successful democratisation. South Africa’s post-apartheid democratic transition was widely lauded as a textbook case, yet declini…
Countering urban binaries within a third space: Durban, South Africa's experience as a counter-city
This paper explores the notion of the ‘counter-city’, which has emerged through processes of ‘countering’ within the framework of ‘third space’, in Durban, South Africa. Countering represents alternate conceptualizations and practices of urban processes to those of dominant northern discourse. Durban transitioned from a colonial and apartheid city, based on social separation, inequality, and differential service provision in the 20th century, to …
The ethnic-spatial conservation fix: Contradictory tensions between restitution and enclosure within communally owned protected areas in South Africa
The history of protected areas in South Africa is inextricably linked to the forced removals of rural Black South Africans by the colonial and apartheid governments based on racially discriminatory laws. To redress historical injustices, the South African National Land Reform Programme enabled land claimants to reclaim land rights to their ancestral lands, which may include modern-day protected areas. The collective ownership of communal land has…
Introduction to the special issue - Frontiers of property: Promises, Pitfalls, and Ambivalences of 'Resurgent Collectivisation' in Global Land and Resource Governance
Over the last several decades, a growing number of states, international organisations, and NGOs have pressed for new legislation and policies to formally recognise previously neglected options for collectively owning – rather than simply accessing or managing – lands and natural resources. In both ex-European colonies and other transitional development contexts, accompanying legal reforms have often taken on explicitly restitutive overtones, fra…
Between the market and the developmental state – the place and limits of pro-poor Engo led “waste-preneurship” in South Africa
Southern Waste geographies have focused on informal waste-picking and the emergence of neoliberal waste regimes as responses to inadequate Household Solid Waste Management (HWSM) – exploring cost-benefit relationships, labour, and market dynamics, respectively. Less understood regarding reconfigurations of waste governance is the role and performance of Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations (ENGOs) that have attempted to improve HSWM and r…
Biodiversity Economy and conservation territorialization: A pyrrhic strategy in Kwazulu-Natal
Post-apartheid Kwazulu-Natal is in the midst of ecological and social crises related to land ownership, resource control, minerals extraction, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. The environs of the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi National Park are a violent environment, where the immediate violence of an anti-poaching 'war' waged over fears of Rhinoceros extinction, is counter-posed to the slow violence permeating the lives of marginal rural resi…
Echoes From the Rocks: Contextualising Land Reform and Resettled Farmer Experiences in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe
This article seeks to characterise and contextualise land reform, and the experiences of resettled farmers, in the under-researched Matabeleland South. It does so through a historicised, landscape approach to changes in the post-Fast Track Land Reform Programme agrarian structure in two wards in Matobo District. While new land dispensation is still consolidating, outcomes are varied, and while beneficiaries are vulnerable to drought in mixed farm…
Conciliatory whiteness: White farmers’ accommodations and responses to land reform in Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe
This article seeks to contribute to growing academic literature on land reform and whiteness in Zimbabwe, where there have been calls for nuance in the analysis of agrarian change. The research which underpins it explores differentiated responses to land reform on the part of a sample of white farmers (as well as A1 and A2 beneficiaries), in the environs of Matobo district, Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe. It characterises a range of responses on th…
A Social Exchange Analysis of Adaptive Governance in Water Allocation Processes, the Kafue Flats, Zambia
Adaptive governance is an emergent approach to water allocation that alludes to the social conditions that enable the range of interactions among actors as they agree and pursue mutually desired water allocation outcomes. Limited successful efforts aimed at implementing adaptive governance suggest a dearth in understanding and implementing adaptive governance. Using the analytic lens of social exchange theory, we draw attention to relations of de…
Fatalism and Dissidence in Dukuduku, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: Ongoing Contestations Over Land, Resources and Identities
This article explores the use of identity politics in conflicts that pertain to land, land restitution and traditional authority in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and more specifically the Dukuduku area. Under the influence of past geographic displacements, ongoing neoliberal transformations and the transition to democracy under the post-apartheid government, not least including contested traditional authority, the land and the people in D…
Conceptualizing ‘the Urban’ Through the Lens of Durban, South Africa
Contested carbon: Carbon forestry as a speculatively virtual, falteringly material and disputed territorial assemblage
Reforming global carbon markets or re-imagining alternative climate solutions and sustainabilities? An analysis of selected NGO strategies in Uganda
Carbon markets have emerged globally as a central feature in market based strategies to address the climate crisis. Global trade in carbon is based on the premise that it is possible to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and stabilise the earth's climate, while at the same time generating new forms of capital accumulation. Amongst carbon market initiatives includes Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) type projects…
The neoliberalisation of forestry governance, market environmentalism and re-territorialisation in Uganda
There is often a disjuncture between idealised forestry governance models which posit a ‘win-win for community and environment’ through participatory, multi-stakeholder international development discourses and interventions – and the actually existing processes and structures of natural resource government through which they are articulated. By applying, first, established theorisations of the initial territorialisation of state forestry territor…
The choreography of sacrifice: Market environmentalism, biopolitics and environmental damage
Beyond "Win-Win" Narratives: The Varieties of Eastern and Southern African Carbon Forestry and Scope for Critique
Constructing walls of carbon – the complexities of community, carbon sequestration and protected areas in Uganda
Carbon forestry represents a degree of continuity and discontinuity with traditional conservation practices, rescripting forestry management/governance and land access through projects on the ground in variegated, context-dependent ways. Utilising the comparative lens of two distinct projects operating on state-led protected areas in the east of Uganda, and focusing on their contested boundaries, this paper reflects on these dynamics and tries to…
Contested carbon: Carbon forestry as a speculatively virtual, falteringly material and disputed territorial assemblage
The choreography of sacrifice: Market environmentalism, biopolitics and environmental damage
Constructing walls of carbon – the complexities of community, carbon sequestration and protected areas in Uganda
Carbon forestry represents a degree of continuity and discontinuity with traditional conservation practices, rescripting forestry management/governance and land access through projects on the ground in variegated, context-dependent ways. Utilising the comparative lens of two distinct projects operating on state-led protected areas in the east of Uganda, and focusing on their contested boundaries, this paper reflects on these dynamics and tries to…
Beyond "Win-Win" Narratives: The Varieties of Eastern and Southern African Carbon Forestry and Scope for Critique
The neoliberalisation of forestry governance, market environmentalism and re-territorialisation in Uganda
There is often a disjuncture between idealised forestry governance models which posit a ‘win-win for community and environment’ through participatory, multi-stakeholder international development discourses and interventions – and the actually existing processes and structures of natural resource government through which they are articulated. By applying, first, established theorisations of the initial territorialisation of state forestry territor…
Biodiversity Economy and conservation territorialization: A pyrrhic strategy in Kwazulu-Natal
Post-apartheid Kwazulu-Natal is in the midst of ecological and social crises related to land ownership, resource control, minerals extraction, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. The environs of the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi National Park are a violent environment, where the immediate violence of an anti-poaching 'war' waged over fears of Rhinoceros extinction, is counter-posed to the slow violence permeating the lives of marginal rural resi…
The ethnic-spatial conservation fix: Contradictory tensions between restitution and enclosure within communally owned protected areas in South Africa
The history of protected areas in South Africa is inextricably linked to the forced removals of rural Black South Africans by the colonial and apartheid governments based on racially discriminatory laws. To redress historical injustices, the South African National Land Reform Programme enabled land claimants to reclaim land rights to their ancestral lands, which may include modern-day protected areas. The collective ownership of communal land has…
Fatalism and Dissidence in Dukuduku, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: Ongoing Contestations Over Land, Resources and Identities
This article explores the use of identity politics in conflicts that pertain to land, land restitution and traditional authority in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and more specifically the Dukuduku area. Under the influence of past geographic displacements, ongoing neoliberal transformations and the transition to democracy under the post-apartheid government, not least including contested traditional authority, the land and the people in D…
Conciliatory whiteness: White farmers’ accommodations and responses to land reform in Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe
This article seeks to contribute to growing academic literature on land reform and whiteness in Zimbabwe, where there have been calls for nuance in the analysis of agrarian change. The research which underpins it explores differentiated responses to land reform on the part of a sample of white farmers (as well as A1 and A2 beneficiaries), in the environs of Matobo district, Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe. It characterises a range of responses on th…
Reforming global carbon markets or re-imagining alternative climate solutions and sustainabilities? An analysis of selected NGO strategies in Uganda
Carbon markets have emerged globally as a central feature in market based strategies to address the climate crisis. Global trade in carbon is based on the premise that it is possible to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and stabilise the earth's climate, while at the same time generating new forms of capital accumulation. Amongst carbon market initiatives includes Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) type projects…
Constructing walls of carbon – the complexities of community, carbon sequestration and protected areas in Uganda
Carbon forestry represents a degree of continuity and discontinuity with traditional conservation practices, rescripting forestry management/governance and land access through projects on the ground in variegated, context-dependent ways. Utilising the comparative lens of two distinct projects operating on state-led protected areas in the east of Uganda, and focusing on their contested boundaries, this paper reflects on these dynamics and tries to…
Beyond "Win-Win" Narratives: The Varieties of Eastern and Southern African Carbon Forestry and Scope for Critique
The neoliberalisation of forestry governance, market environmentalism and re-territorialisation in Uganda
There is often a disjuncture between idealised forestry governance models which posit a ‘win-win for community and environment’ through participatory, multi-stakeholder international development discourses and interventions – and the actually existing processes and structures of natural resource government through which they are articulated. By applying, first, established theorisations of the initial territorialisation of state forestry territor…
The choreography of sacrifice: Market environmentalism, biopolitics and environmental damage
Contested carbon: Carbon forestry as a speculatively virtual, falteringly material and disputed territorial assemblage
Reforming global carbon markets or re-imagining alternative climate solutions and sustainabilities? An analysis of selected NGO strategies in Uganda
Carbon markets have emerged globally as a central feature in market based strategies to address the climate crisis. Global trade in carbon is based on the premise that it is possible to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and stabilise the earth's climate, while at the same time generating new forms of capital accumulation. Amongst carbon market initiatives includes Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) type projects…
Conceptualizing ‘the Urban’ Through the Lens of Durban, South Africa
A Social Exchange Analysis of Adaptive Governance in Water Allocation Processes, the Kafue Flats, Zambia
Adaptive governance is an emergent approach to water allocation that alludes to the social conditions that enable the range of interactions among actors as they agree and pursue mutually desired water allocation outcomes. Limited successful efforts aimed at implementing adaptive governance suggest a dearth in understanding and implementing adaptive governance. Using the analytic lens of social exchange theory, we draw attention to relations of de…
Fatalism and Dissidence in Dukuduku, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: Ongoing Contestations Over Land, Resources and Identities
This article explores the use of identity politics in conflicts that pertain to land, land restitution and traditional authority in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and more specifically the Dukuduku area. Under the influence of past geographic displacements, ongoing neoliberal transformations and the transition to democracy under the post-apartheid government, not least including contested traditional authority, the land and the people in D…
Conciliatory whiteness: White farmers’ accommodations and responses to land reform in Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe
This article seeks to contribute to growing academic literature on land reform and whiteness in Zimbabwe, where there have been calls for nuance in the analysis of agrarian change. The research which underpins it explores differentiated responses to land reform on the part of a sample of white farmers (as well as A1 and A2 beneficiaries), in the environs of Matobo district, Matabeleland South, Zimbabwe. It characterises a range of responses on th…
Biodiversity Economy and conservation territorialization: A pyrrhic strategy in Kwazulu-Natal
Post-apartheid Kwazulu-Natal is in the midst of ecological and social crises related to land ownership, resource control, minerals extraction, environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. The environs of the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi National Park are a violent environment, where the immediate violence of an anti-poaching 'war' waged over fears of Rhinoceros extinction, is counter-posed to the slow violence permeating the lives of marginal rural resi…
Echoes From the Rocks: Contextualising Land Reform and Resettled Farmer Experiences in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe
This article seeks to characterise and contextualise land reform, and the experiences of resettled farmers, in the under-researched Matabeleland South. It does so through a historicised, landscape approach to changes in the post-Fast Track Land Reform Programme agrarian structure in two wards in Matobo District. While new land dispensation is still consolidating, outcomes are varied, and while beneficiaries are vulnerable to drought in mixed farm…
Between the market and the developmental state – the place and limits of pro-poor Engo led “waste-preneurship” in South Africa
Southern Waste geographies have focused on informal waste-picking and the emergence of neoliberal waste regimes as responses to inadequate Household Solid Waste Management (HWSM) – exploring cost-benefit relationships, labour, and market dynamics, respectively. Less understood regarding reconfigurations of waste governance is the role and performance of Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations (ENGOs) that have attempted to improve HSWM and r…
Taking a back seat: The politicization of municipal environmental governance in South Africa
Local government (LG) in South Africa (SA) is mandated to provide adequate service delivery and to ensure environmental protection within municipal boundaries. Local Environmental Governance (EG) is influenced by the actions of municipal councils and political leadership, resulting in politicized local EG. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) party has been gradually losing political power since 1994, and corruption and unprofessionalism in…
Doctoral Thesis Review – Anmeldelse av doktoravhandling
Ritah Kigonya sets out to investigate biodiversity offsetting as a framework for achieving ‘no net loss of biodiversity’ by compensating for biodiversity loss in one place through enhancing it in a
Alter-nation? Factions, Coalitions and Environmental Governance in the Context of Contested Post-apartheid Local State Democratisation
Many African states have become electoral democracies, but others are still run by electoral authoritarian regimes, and/or exhibit procedural but not more substantive emancipatory extensions of rights and functions. In such contexts, alternation of power, or electoral turnover, has been recognised as a key signifier of successful democratisation. South Africa’s post-apartheid democratic transition was widely lauded as a textbook case, yet declini…
Countering urban binaries within a third space: Durban, South Africa's experience as a counter-city
This paper explores the notion of the ‘counter-city’, which has emerged through processes of ‘countering’ within the framework of ‘third space’, in Durban, South Africa. Countering represents alternate conceptualizations and practices of urban processes to those of dominant northern discourse. Durban transitioned from a colonial and apartheid city, based on social separation, inequality, and differential service provision in the 20th century, to …
The ethnic-spatial conservation fix: Contradictory tensions between restitution and enclosure within communally owned protected areas in South Africa
The history of protected areas in South Africa is inextricably linked to the forced removals of rural Black South Africans by the colonial and apartheid governments based on racially discriminatory laws. To redress historical injustices, the South African National Land Reform Programme enabled land claimants to reclaim land rights to their ancestral lands, which may include modern-day protected areas. The collective ownership of communal land has…
Introduction to the special issue - Frontiers of property: Promises, Pitfalls, and Ambivalences of 'Resurgent Collectivisation' in Global Land and Resource Governance
Over the last several decades, a growing number of states, international organisations, and NGOs have pressed for new legislation and policies to formally recognise previously neglected options for collectively owning – rather than simply accessing or managing – lands and natural resources. In both ex-European colonies and other transitional development contexts, accompanying legal reforms have often taken on explicitly restitutive overtones, fra…
Maps are now our spears: Participatory digital counter-mapping Xolobeni, South Africa
In Mpondoland on South Africa’s ‘Wild Coast’ the Amadiba people of Umgungundlovu (Xolobeni) have fought imposed ‘development’ projects since colonial times. In addition to longstanding efforts to mine the titanium-rich sand dunes, the Amadiba people have successfully resisted seismic testing for oil and gas in their coastal waters, and continue to struggle against mass tourism, industrial cannabis production, and a so-called ‘smart city.’ Foremos…
Political science (17 works) · Geography (13 works) · Corporate governance (9 works) · Economics (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (7 works) · Water Governance and Infrastructure (7 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (6 works) · Law (6 works)