Exploring criteria for transformative policy capacity in the context of South Africa’s biodiversity economy

In the wake of increasingly complex sustainability challenges, societal transformations of currently unsustainable socio-economic production and consumption patterns are imperative. At the same time, international scholarly debates emphasise a decline in the policy capacity of societal actors to deal with the complexity of putting policy into practice. South Africa’s national development strategy of utilising its unique biodiversity for developing natural products and biopharmaceuticals was anticipated by the government to help overcome the country’s triple challenge of unemployment, poverty and inequality. Accompanied by a set of national regulations, introduced to safeguard biodiversity thresholds and regulate socio-economic activities along biomass value chains, this policy of a biodiversity economy is framed by the South African government, as a societal transformation. Informed by a plural theoretical lens drawing upon insights from international scholarly literature on transitions and transformations and insights from policy capacity, implementation research and governance literature, we interrogate qualitative empirical evidence from the field for how and whether such transformation has materialised for different bioprospecting actors in South Africa. Asking which factors enabled or limited this transformation, we distil criteria for what we call transformative policy capacity. We argue that transformations are political and deeply context-dependent relying on the resources and capabilities of involved societal actors to put political plans into practice, including the policy target group. We conclude that a biodiversity economy-driven transformation has yet to become a reality for many South Africans, but efforts are being made to foster the policy capacity of central actors and to adapt the regulatory system to be more conducive for the anticipated change.