Sustainable biodiversity stewardship and inclusive development in South Africa: a novel package for a sustainable future Yashwant S Rawat Sustainable biodiversity stewardship (SBS) is needed on private lands in order to promote inclusive development (ID). Managing private land for conservation and landscape functionality can be costly, therefore, fiscal incentives like income tax deductions and property rates exclusions can help encourage biodiversity stewardship and thereby contribute to meeting the social and ecological goals of inclusive development. The experience of South Africa shows that such fiscal incentives can ensure that private landowners protect ecosystems, improve water yields, mitigate fire and flood risks, and promote landscape-scale connectivity. Furthermore, it can contribute to broader socio-economic goals such as rural development, inclusion of marginalized or disadvantaged communities and create green jobs. This paper reports that many private landowners have entered into agreements for biodiversity stewardship. Address Sustainability Research Unit, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, George Campus, P/Bag X6531, George 6530, Western Cape, South Africa Corresponding author: Rawat, Yashwant S (yas_rawat@yahoo.com) Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2017, 24:89–95 This review comes from a themed issue on Sustainability science Edited by Nicky RM Pouw and Joyeeta Gupta Received: 20 July 2016; Revised: 07 March 2017; Accepted: 10 March 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2017.03.003 1877-3435/ã 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Introduction This paper focuses on fiscal incentives in sustainable biodiversity stewardship (SBS) that contribute to Inclu- sive Development (ID) [1  ,2] and how they relate to nature conservation [3  ,4]. To foster ID in SBS through financial instruments, the government needs a holistic approach to address nature conservation priorities, poverty alleviation and inequality [5]. This is particularly important for a country like South Africa where for over two decades, the government has been working to address the rich–poor gap and historical injustices [5–7]. In South Africa, fiscal incentives have been offered to landowners [4,8  ,SANBI’s Stewardship case study, SANBI’s Stewardship Manual; URL: http://www. sanbi.org] for biodiversity stewardship. Managing pri- vate land for conservation can be expensive [3  ,9  ] and complicated, especially when it comes to stake- holder engagement, which in many instances is shied away from [10  ]. The fiscal incentives approach is considered relevant for encouraging biodiversity stew- ardship on private lands [3  ,11,12,13,14  ,YS Rawat, unpublished]. However, the effectiveness of fiscal incentives for biodiversity stewardship that contributes to ID has not been assessed in depth. Additionally, though it has been recognized that SBS can provide many benefits, initiatives to advance SBS in these countries where a large portion of natural land is privately owned are difficult to develop because more pressing issues such as poverty and ill-health often take precedence over the goals of nature conservation. The move towards inclusive development thinking [1  ] begins to add a stronger rigor to making socio- economic concerns and the environment more evenly matched and inclusive [15,16]. It is, therefore, an important step forward to couch the SBS debates on incentives against this backdrop and in the context of ID, as an overarching, macro scale framework [1  ]. The literature was reviewed across disciplines in order to examine the contributions of SBS to ID. Literature sources included academic papers, government reports as well as website interrogation. The literature review was supported with first-hand experience of SBS and ID practices gained from stakeholder engagement and con- sultations. The geographical demarcation of the research area was South Africa; financial instruments within this study area were identified and their impacts on SBS and ID were analyzed. This paper, therefore, addresses this issue as it relates to private land ownership in the context of South Africa [14  ,17,18,19,YS Rawat,unpublished]. It (a) to analyzes the potential contributions of SBS to ID, (b) identifies the financial instruments that can incenti- vise SBS, (c) assesses their impacts (effectiveness and trade-offs), and (d) develops a framework to advance SBS and ID on private lands. Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect www.sciencedirect.com Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 2017, 24:89–95