Cross-scale governance and ecosystem service delivery: A case narrative from the Olifants River in north-eastern South Africa

The narrative describes part crisis response, part chance emergence, and along the way building of trust. Persistent staff capacity across agencies, whose members developed a sufficiently overlapping vision, was deemed crucial. The widening of linkages across scales and levels was a key feature, though attention is drawn to other important factors such as power dynamics. The difficulties encountered gave birth to new hope, with full recognition that such messy and dynamic social-ecological systems need to be navigated as best possible using complexity-friendly adaptive approaches, containing elements (including important cross-scale ones) that came together in this case. This case narrative is believed to contain generic lessons for ecosystem service governance.