Johan Enqvist

Enqvist studies people’s relationship with the rest of nature, focusing on values, perceptions and actions shape stewardship of urban social-ecological systems. He leads two projects based in Cape Town, South Africa.

The first, funded by VR (the Swedish Research Council) investigates how the city’s recent water crisis affected people's awareness of, concern for and ability to act to conserve water resources. The second, recently funded by Formas (a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development), will study the often fraught relationship between residents and urban wildlife in the city’s fringes.

Both topics highlight how in the Anthropocene, human expectations of what is “natural” system behaviour are increasingly defied. Such uncertainty can cause disruption, conflict and fear, but also help shape new knowledge and new forms of collaborations towards more sustainable human-nature relationships. Environmental justice and inequality are important aspects of this work, and Enqvist collaborates directly with various community-based groups and other non-academic partners to co-design his research to meet societal needs as well as answering pressing questions in sustainability science.

Prior to his current work, Enqvist completed a two-year postdoc at University of Cape Town’s Department of Environmental and Geographical Science. This studied urban resilience and water governance during the peak and aftermath of Cape Town’s 2015-2018 drought, focusing on how multiple interpretations of resilience and sustainability affects cross-scale governance in urban environments.

Enqvist earned his PhD at SRC in October 2017. His thesis explored the concept of stewardship through case studies of civic engagement in urban ecosystem management in Bangalore, India and New York, USA. This work demonstrated different methodological approaches to studying three main dimensions of stewardship: care, knowledge and agency.