People & Partners

Dr Johan Enqvist is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre and a senior research officer at the African Climate & Development Initiative at University of Cape Town. Johan studies people’s relationship with the rest of nature, focusing on how values, perceptions and actions enable stewardship of urban social-ecological systems. For many city dwellers, notions of “nature” are increasingly associated with something either highly controlled, far away, or under threat. However, urban sprawl and global environmental change increasingly remind people that nature can also interrupt their lives in direct and unpredictable ways.

Johan’s research explores how people respond to this and how it shapes their relationships both with each other and with their environments. His ongoing Unruly Natures project studies the highly polarised human-baboon relationships in Cape Town, South Africa. The project is designed in dialogue with local communities and uses mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to systematically examine subjective experiences, unpack underlying values, and provide more robust knowledge about how to build more sustainable management practices. The project speaks to fundamental questions of biosphere stewardship and the role of care, especially in the Anthropocene where uncertainty makes discussions about what world we want increasingly contested and value-based.