Towards Telecoupled Governance - Lessons Learned from a Case Study of Bio-Pharmaceuticals and Bio-Cosmetics in South Africa’s Bioeconomy

Telecoupling is a concept capturing the phenomenon that outcomes of socio-ecological interactions in one location have repercussions in other socio-ecological systems elsewhere on this planet. The impacts of such distant interactions on the sustainability of other systems brings with a large uncertainty often associated with unclear cause and effect relations. Seminally, Liu et al. (2013) explored the effects of soybean trade between Brazil and China and the local socio-economic and socio-ecological effects on aspects of sustainability China. In a similar case, they investigated socio-ecological and socio-economic effects of the introduction of alien invasive species into the United States along major trade routes connecting the US and Southern American countries. However, repercussions in distant places might, again, affect socio-ecological systems in the initial sending system through feedback loops. In this paper, we focus on regulatory feedback loops regarding the coupled human and natural system of the Bioeconomy, which is broadly understood as the part of the economy that uses natural resources to produce services and goods (El-Chichakli et al. 2016). Nevertheless, studying interconnected systems is complex, because the matter under investigation is characterized by multi-dimensional, multi-level and multi-stakeholder situations, often labelled as ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Weber 1975). This is especially true concerning the question of how to govern telecoupled systems. A starting point for developing answers to this topical question is to investigate regulatory effects of international and national legislation and policies on local, sector-specific socio-economic practices and their sustainability outcomes in the sending system. As such, this paper broadens the telecoupling framework to investigate the case of internationally traded biopharmaceuticals and biocosmetics originating from within South Africa’s bioeconomy. For faster drug licensing and improved market access, the South African government has included related regulations from the European Medicine Agency (EMA) and the United States’ Federal Drug Agency (FDA) to guide processes of bioprospecting and drug development of new plant-based pharmaceuticals and personal care products within the country. However, we ask, which feedback loops this inclusion had on the socio-economic and socio-ecological sustainability of bioprospecting and drug development practices in South Africa, and, in which ways do our findings allow for distilling lessons learned for what we propose as ‘telecoupled governance’? Answering these questions based on empirical evidence from South Africa we show, first, the value of the telecoupling framework for conceptualising spill over effects and regulatory feedback loops within interconnected systems. Second, we argue that such conceptualisations provide expedient starting points for a more concrete identification of regulatory practices for designing governance frameworks, which attempt to regulate complex systems. Finally, we propose a conceptual way forward for governing complex telecoupled systems. In other words, wicked problems need wicked answers.