This book offers a historically and ethnographically informed case study of environmental governance, institutional and land-use change, and livelihood strategies in a former homeland in the South African Free State province. Based on rich archival material, the author reconstructs how the state invented a degradation narrative and used it as legitimation for the regulation of human-environment relations during the twentieth century. In addition, the study investigates how people today make a living in a post-agrarian society characterized by low agricultural production, diversification of non-farm incomes, and declining population numbers, declining population numbers. Author Christiane Naumann is a lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne.