Eco-spatial materialities of inequality: a critical socio-ecological, narrative and 'object'-based exploration of food, water and livelihoods

Within the Western Cape of South Africa, there is a complex interrelationship between food sovereignty, water shortages and drought, climate change, perspectives on conservation, environmental policies and governance structures, illicit economies relating to the local ecology, and poverty and ecological injustice experienced by disenfranchised communities in that context. This has been exacerbated by the legacy of apartheid overlain with new forms of global inequalities structured within the Anthropocene.

South Africa has amongst the highest levels of income inequality in the world, which is marked out by apartheid spatialities and concomitant socio-political effects, but also through resource inequalities and injustices. It would take more than changing local policies to correct imbalances, as there is a complex set of competing economic, political, cultural and socio-historical influences that keep inequality and marginalisation in play, and that are intricately related to dominant global systems of trade, communications, technologies, and modernism. For democratic transformation to prevail, this complex set of interrelationships would need to be more fully grasped and unpicked before strategic action could be formulated. Within the complex of competing discourses and modern-day obsessions, such strategic actions require political will. These issues are at the nexus of debates around natural resource utilisation, the politics of conservation and 'food security', the role of dominant economic development discourses in perpetuating rather than alleviating inequality and ecological devastation, and what a socio-ecological view may mean for disenfranchised communities within the Anthropocene.

As socio-ecological/socio-materialist framing for research, the noted complexity can be partially traced through the movements of specific ecological objects found within the Western Cape, and through the webs of influence and embodied narratives of those who come into contact with them. In seeking to understand them as eco-political nodes of influence, the research focusses on four related objects of food and plants and traces their routes from original 'homes' to final destination. These objects draw out narratives and discourses that attend them and relate to the embodied journeys of those that handle, use, transfer or trade with them. The eco-objects and attendant narratives serve as nodal referents with which to engage with development complexities of land, space, governance, conservation, natural resource utilisation and distribution, and informal and formal economies. These foods and plants act as metaphorical objects that facilitate engagement with the highly contested political, social, ecological and economic discourses that surround how these objects move, are traded, are used, are governed, and are viewed by different actors in the local situated context of informal settlement life in Cape Town. They also speak to the politics of livelihoods and the ongoing inequalities that are the legacies of apartheid, compounded by newer climate change and related ecological stresses of the Anthropocene.