Informality is a distinguishing characteristic of cities in the Global South and is strongly associated with urban inequality. Yet, in pursuing resilience, urban resilience strategies and planning have yet to grapple with the role of informality in social-ecological dynamics, resulting in incomplete representations of the reality of these cities’ socioeconomic and demographic diversity. Neglect of informality has significant, but uncertain, implications for equity in resilience planning. In this paper, we conceptualize the complex, dynamic urban systems in southern Africa as emergent from the interdependent interactions between formally recognized and so-called “informal” institutions, economic activities, and social-ecological processes and entities. These interactions generate feedback and emergent outcomes locally and at the scale of the broader urban system, with complex implications for urban resilience, equity, and sustainability. We explore the role of informality in urban resilience in relation to two cases of urban environmental crises: drought in Cape Town, South Africa, and flooding in Lilongwe, Malawi. The cases illustrate how managing resilience at one spatial or temporal scale can mask or generate inequitable outcomes at other scales. The role of informality and its linkages need to be acknowledged for informality to be better incorporated into urban resilience planning, as recognition is often the first step to confronting legal and normative barriers and significant power asymmetries. Informality is a malleable social-political construct, and the actors who control its definition have significant influence over the distribution of rights, responsibilities, and resilience in urban systems. Any strategy to improve social equity in urban resilience planning therefore must address the asymmetries in power that characterize the informal/ formal divide. Formally recognized organizations that can legitimately bridge informal and formal spaces play key roles in enhancing procedural, and thus distributive, justice outcomes, as well as in creating the collective capacity to address rapid urban change in the Global South.

Humans and wildlife increasingly share urban space, which elevates the risk of negative interactions. Management efforts conventionally focus on controlling species that are considered problematic, but polarization in affected communities' perceptions and values may pose a greater problem for management in cities where ideas about preferred human–wildlife interactions vary greatly. This study uses Q-method to investigate what type of human-baboon relations are desirable among residents from seven areas in Cape Town regularly visited by chacma baboons. Two main perspectives emerged, each is motivated by a distinct set of values: 'Live with Baboons' is focused on positive outcomes for nature and society, recognizing humans' responsibility to mitigate negative interactions; whereas 'Control and Manage Baboons' views nature as something that should be controlled in order to maintain a stable and safe human society. Despite differences, the two perspectives also agree in rejecting abusive language toward baboons, recognizing that contexts differ and require different solutions, and acknowledging that resolving conflict requires collaboration. This has important bearing for recent public engagement processes led by local authorities to review management strategies. Residents' values and perceptions are manifestations of different lived realities and actively engaging with them can help to nuance dichotomies in the baboon discourse.

We bring together two decades of research on cross-scale spatial and temporal connectivity of water in the Anthropocene to understand the implications for institutional fit and water governance, with a focus on river basin organizations and watershed-based bodies. There is strong evidence showing how hydrological cycles are tightly coupled across larger spatial scales than they were in the past, which implies a possible expansion of the boundaries typically considered in the study and governance of water. Temporally, frequent time lags between action and consequence and the potential for increasing concurrence of extreme events pose risks for decision-makers trying to make accurate and appropriate decisions. Both cross-scale spatial and temporal connectivity create new challenges to key principles regarding participation, deliberation and collaboration in water governance. We argue for a shift from emphasizing how governance can ‘fit’ a closed, biophysical boundary towards a stronger consideration of institutional ‘fitness’ through flexibility, responsiveness and anticipatory capacity to better support water resilience and sustainability.

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 economic inequality can undermine these goals and force prioritisations that many see as unfair. This happened in Cape Town, South Africa, during its 2015–2018 water crisis. This study investigates what residents in three different socioeconomic contexts view as fair water tariffs 1 year after the crisis. Using Q method, we describe five distinct perspectives on fairness: ‘the Insurer’, ‘the Individualist’, ’the Bureaucrat’, ‘the Humanitarian’, and ‘the Prepper’. These, we argue, can help distinguish between different ideas of what fairness implies, and what is required to promote it. We exemplify this by examining how viewpoints might have been shaped by specific communities’ experiences during and after the apartheid state’s discriminatory segregation policies. Using distributive, procedural and interactional interpretations of fairness, we discuss how the complex layers of poverty, inequality, mistrust, privilege and discrimination might produce different experiences and ideas of who should pay for and benefit from water services. Using these insights, we also reflect on the merits of tariffs that emphasise cost recovery and resource conservation over social needs, and the risks this poses for growing informal settlements in climate-stressed cities of the global South.

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 technical solutions that tend to ignore or even exacerbate the complex social problems on the ground. Water justice requires attention be paid to the range of everyday realities that exist in the spectrum from formal to informal settlements.

Calls for transformative adaptation to climate change require attention to the type of capacity building that can support it. Community-level capacity building can help to ensure ownership and legitimacy of longer-term interventions. Given that marginalized communities are highly vulnerable to climate risk, it is important to build their capacity to adapt locally and to integrate their perspectives into higher-level adaptation measures. Current adaptation policy does not pay sufficient attention to this. Using a Cape Town-based project on water governance in low-income urban settlements, this paper explores how a transdisciplinary research project supported capacity building. Our findings suggest that knowledge co-creation at the community level is central to the capacity building that is needed in order to inform transformative adaptation. The collaborative methodology used is also important; we illustrate how a transdisciplinary approach can contribute to transformative adaptation where knowledge is co-produced to empower community-level actors and organizations to assert their perspectives with greater confidence and legitimacy. We argue that if capacity building processes shift from the top-down transferal of existing knowledge to the co-creation of contextual understandings, they have the potential to deliver more transformative adaptation. By considering diverse sources of knowledge and knowledge systems, capacity building can start to confront inequalities and shift dominant power dynamics. Adaptation policy could provide more guidance and support for community-level transdisciplinary processes that can enable this type of transformative adaptation.

Interactions among social inequalities, environmental stressors, and shocks are illustrated through communities’ subjective experiences of water-related challenges and responses to crises. This situation is perhaps most visible in the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on marginalized communities where climate change and systemic inequities are already threatening access to water and sanitation. It is critical to integrate dimensions related to well-being into research about vulnerable communities’ capacities and strategies for coping and adapting to such crises. Here, we investigate water-related risks to health and well-being using a subjectivity lens, a particularly useful tool for understanding community-level resilience to lesser-known stressors and crisis impacts. To inform this study, we used households’ self-reported water issues in Cape Town, South Africa’s low-income areas from before the pandemic, in addition to community responses during the pandemic. The findings show how inadequate access to water and sanitation affects people’s health and well-being, both directly by exposure to wastewater and impaired hygiene, and indirectly by creating stress and social conflict, and undermining subsistence gardening and medical self-care. However, our study also illustrates how grassroots-led responses to the COVID-19 crisis address these vulnerabilities and identify priorities for managing water to support well-being. The results demonstrate two ways that subjective perceptions of well-being can help to promote resilience: first, by identifying stressors that undermine community well-being and adaptive capacity; and second, by voicing community experiences that can help to guide crisis responses and initiatives critical for adapting to social-ecological shocks. The results have important implications for enabling transformative change that aligns efforts to address issues linked to poverty and inequality with those seeking to respond to environmental emergencies.

Bottom-up approaches are often presented as a remedy to environmental governance problems caused by poorly aligned social institutions and fragmented ecosystems. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence demonstrating how such social-ecological fit might emerge and help achieve desirable outcomes. This paper combines quantitative social-ecological network analysis with interviews to investigate whether bottom-up approaches in lake governance improve the fit. We study groups of residents seeking to improve management of a network of lakes in Bengaluru, India. Results show that 23 'lake groups' collaborate in a way that aligns with how lakes are hydrologically connected, thus strengthening the social-ecological fit. Three groups founded around 2010 have mobilized support from municipal officers and introduced an ecosystem-based approach to lake management that recognizes their ecological functions and dependence on, the broader hydrological network. These groups have also changed how other lake groups operate: groups founded after 2010 are more collaborative and more prone to contribute to social-ecological fit compared to the older lake groups. This paper demonstrates the utility of a theoretically informed method for examining the impact of bottom-up approaches, which, we argue, is important for a more informed perspective on their relevance and potential contribution to urban environmental governance.

Never before have humans wielded a greater ability to alter and disrupt planetary processes. Our impact is becoming so noticeable that a new geological epoch has been proposed – the Anthropocene – in which Earth systems might no longer maintain the stable and predictable conditions of the past 12 millennia. This is particularly evident in the rapid expansion of urban areas, where a majority of humans now live and where environmental changes such as rising temperatures and habitat loss are happening faster than elsewhere.  In light of this, questions have been raised about what a more responsible relationship between humans and the rest of the planet might look like. Scholars in sustainability science employ the concept of ‘stewardship’ in searching for an answer; however, with multiple different applications and definitions, there is a need to better understand what stewardship is or what novelty it might add to sustainability research. This thesis investigates stewardship empirically through two case studies of civic engagement for protecting nature in cities – Bengaluru, India and New York City, USA. Further, the thesis also proposes a conceptual framework for how to understand stewardship as a relation between humans and the rest of nature, based on three dimensions: care, knowledge and agency. This investigation into stewardship in the urban context uses a social–ecological systems approach to guide the use of mixed theory and methods from social and natural sciences. The thesis is organized in five papers. Paper I reviews defining challenges in managing urban social–ecological systems and proposes that these can more effectively be addressed by collaborative networks where public, civic, other actors contribute unique skills and abilities. Paper II and Paper III study water resource governance in Bengaluru, a city that has become dependent on external sources while its own water bodies become degraded and depleted.Paper II analyzes how locally based ‘lake groups’ are able to affect change through co-management arrangements, reversing decades of centralization and neglect of lakes’ role in Bengaluru’s water supply.Paper III uses social–ecological network analysis to analyze how patterns in lake groups’ engagements and collaborations show better fit with ecological connectivity of lakes.Paper IV employs sense of place methods to explore how personal bonds to a site shapes motivation and goals in waterfront stewardship in New York City. Finally,Paper V reviews literature on stewardship and proposes a conceptual framework to understand and relate different uses and underlying epistemological approaches in the field. In summary, this thesis presents an empirically grounded contribution to how stewardship can be understood as a human–nature relation emergent from a deep sense ofcare and responsibility, knowledge and learning about how to understand social–ecological dynamics, and theagency and skills needed to influence these dynamics in a way that benefits a greater community of humans as others. Here, the care dimension is particularly important as an underappreciated aspect of social–ecological relations, and asset for addressing spatial and temporal misalignment between management institutions and ecosystem. This thesis shows that care for nature does not erode just because green spaces are degraded by human activities – which may be crucial for promoting stewardship in the Anthropocene.