Publications

Enqvist, J. and van Oyen, W. Sustainable water tariffs and inequality in post‑drought Cape Town: exploring perceptions of fairness. Sustainability Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-022-01217-9

Fair allocation of diminishing natural resources is increasingly central to sustainability. This includes the allocation of costs related to providing access, such as dams, pipes and pumps delivering clean water. Water tariffs are often designed to both recover these costs, meet social needs of water services to the poor, and incentivise conservation in dry times. However, strained public finances, prolonged droughts and econo...

Enqvist, J., Ziervogel, G. (2021). Multilevel Governance for Urban Water Resilience in Bengaluru and Cape Town. In: Baird, J., Plummer, R. (eds) Water Resilience. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48110-0_9

The multifunctionality of water in social–ecological processes complicates its governance, especially in cities where heterogenous populations lead different lives and hold different values. This challenge can potentially be addressed by combining bottom-up and top-down approaches through multilevel governance. Drawing on research from two large, water-stressed cities in the rapidly urbanising global South, this chapter prese...

Enqvist, J., Ziervogel, G., Metelerkamp, L., van Breda, J., Dondi, N., Lusithi, T., Mdunyelwa, A., Mgwigwi, Z., Mhlalisi, M., Myeza, S. and Nomela, G., 2020. Informality and water justice: community perspectives on water issues in Cape Town’s low-income neighbourhoods. International Journal of Water Resources Development, pp.1-22.

Cape Town’s water injustices are entrenched by the mismatch between government interventions and the lived realities in many informal settlements and other low-income areas. This transdisciplinary study draws on over 300 stories from such communities, showing overwhelming frustration with the municipality’s inability to address leaking pipes, faulty bills and poor sanitation. Cape Town’s interventions typically rely on technic...

West., S., Haider, J.L., Masterson, V. et al. 2018. Stewardship, care and relational values. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. Available online 5 November 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2018.10.008

Stewardship is a popular term for describing action in pursuit of sustainability. There is growing interest in how relational values, such as care, animate stewardship action. In this paper we develop relational understandings of care in stewardship, in so doing infusing the relational values literature with modes of ‘relational thinking’ increasingly adopted in sustainability science. We use three theoretical perspectives — d...

Enqvist, J.P., West, S., Masterson, V., Haider, J.L., Svedin, U., Tengö, M. 2018. Stewardship as a boundary object for sustainability research: Linking care, knowledge and agency. Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 179, November 2018, Pages 17-37

Current sustainability challenges – including biodiversity loss, pollution and land-use change – require new ways of understanding, acting in and caring for the landscapes we live in. The concept of stewardship is increasingly used in research, policy and practice to articulate and describe responses to these challenges. However, there are multiple meanings and framings of stewardship across this wide user base that reflect di...

Krasny, M.E., E.S Svendsen, C.K. Van den Bosch, J. Enqvist, A. Russ. 2017. Environmental governance. Urban Environmental Education Review pp. 103-111.

Andersson, E., Enqvist, J., & Tengö. M. 2017. Stewardship in Urban Landscapes. In C. Bieling & T. Plieninger (Eds, The Science and Practice of Landscape Stewardship (pp. 222-238). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316499016.023

This is a chapter from the book "The Science and Practice of Landscape Stewardship". It provides insights into the challenges and the potential of landscape stewardship and identifies future paths for the science and practice of landscape-related sustainability efforts. Aligning analytical perspectives with practical applications, it brings together contributions from leading scholars and innovative models of landscape steward...

Enqvist, J. 2017. Stewardship in an urban world: Civic engagement and human–nature relations in the Anthropocene. PhD thesis, Stockholm University.

What can a responsible relationship to nature look like in a world where humanity is disrupting fundamental ecological processes at a planetary scale? Achieving sustainability is increasingly argued to require a shift towards ‘stewardship’, but often without clearly defining what the concept means or exactly how it is might address the unprecedented challenges of our time. In his doctoral thesis, Johan Enqvist addresses this k...

Masterson, V. A., R. C. Stedman, J. Enqvist, M. Tengö, M. Giusti, D. Wahl, and U. Svedin. 2017. The contribution of sense of place to social-ecological systems research: a review and research agenda. Ecology and Society 22(1):49. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08872-220149

 To develop and apply goals for future sustainability, we must consider what people care about and what motivates them to engage in solving sustainability issues. Sense of place theory and methods provide a rich source of insights that, like the social-ecological systems perspective, assume an interconnected social and biophysical reality. However, these fields of research are only recently beginning to converge, and we see gr...

Enqvist, J., M. Tengö, W.J. Boonstra. 2016.Against the current: Rewiring rigidity trapdynamics in urban water governance throughcivic engagement. Sustainability Science 11:919 – 933.

This paper investigates how the agency of local residents can affect persistent and unsustainable practices in urban water supply governance. Using a case study from Bangalore, India, we analyze a social–ecological trap which developed after a shift to external water provision paired with rapid urbanization. The reluctance of forsaking initial investments in infrastructure and competence, and the subsequent loss of the local n...