This essay concludes a three-part analytical series examining how indigenous plant knowledge in the Cape Floristic Region has been disrupted, interpreted, and mobilised, and what these conditions require of institutions that continue to work with that knowledge.
Work involving indigenous plant knowledge is often organised around a sequence that places ethical engagement after definition. Responsibility is treated as something that follows once research outcomes are clear, claims are stabilised, or applications are specified. This ordering reflects a confidence that clarity can be achieved before obligation is engaged.
In the Cape Floristic Region, historical conditions complicate this logic.
The disruption of indigenous social systems through dispossession, displacement, and language loss did more than obscure particular practices. It altered how knowledge could be held, transmitted, and contested over time. The effects of these processes are visible in the present, not only in gaps in the archive, but in the difficulty of linking contemporary use to specific historical lineages with certainty.
Institutions working with African biological and sensory systems therefore, operate within a field shaped by interruption. They do not encounter knowledge in a complete or settled form. At the same time, they continue to derive value from that knowledge. Plant material, processing logics, and sensory grammars inform research and innovation across flavour, nutrition, and wellness, whether or not they are explicitly framed as indigenous.
Engagement exists as a matter of practice.
Responsibility follows from this engagement, not from the resolution of historical questions that may no longer be answerable. The absence of definitive attribution does not negate the relationship. It reflects the conditions under which that relationship was disrupted.
This has implications for how consultation and benefit are understood. Assertions that there is no one to consult rely on a narrow definition of legitimacy, one that presumes uninterrupted transmission, formal recognition, or documentary continuity. In the CFR, such conditions were systematically undermined. Treating their absence as grounds for disengagement reproduces the effects of historical erasure rather than responding to them.
At the same time, ethical engagement cannot be reduced to retrospective attribution. Assigning lineage where it cannot be responsibly demonstrated introduces new forms of distortion. Responsible practice requires an ability to work with uncertainty without resolving it prematurely, and to recognise limits without withdrawing obligation.
This places a particular burden on institutions operating upstream of the application. Decisions about how knowledge is framed, qualified, and circulated shape downstream activity, including regulatory interpretation, commercial positioning, and benefit-sharing arrangements. These decisions are not neutral. They establish reference points that others rely on.
In such contexts, responsibility cannot be left to individual judgment or episodic process. It must be embedded in institutional practice. This involves treating consultation as an ongoing relationship rather than a procedural requirement, recognising that different uses may implicate different communities, and carrying uncertainty forward explicitly rather than compressing it out of narrative convenience.
Benefit-sharing, similarly, cannot be understood solely as compensation for past use. In the Cape Floristic Region, the more pressing question concerns participation in present value creation. Institutions continue to derive benefit from African biological and sensory systems. Ethical conduct, therefore, requires sharing value in the present, even where historical attribution cannot be conclusively established.
The form that such sharing takes will vary across contexts. What matters is that it is governed, transparent, and durable. Discretionary or symbolic gestures do little to address structural imbalance. Durable arrangements require clarity of intent, accountability over time, and a willingness to accept complexity.
For institutions engaged in long-horizon work, credibility is established less through assertion than through restraint. This includes clarity about evidentiary thresholds, consistency in how claims are evaluated, and discipline in how uncertainty is handled. It also includes the capacity to refrain from engagement where conditions for ethical practice cannot be met, even when opportunities are attractive.
In the Cape Floristic Region, obligation persists regardless of evidentiary completeness. It arises from ongoing use, contemporary impact, and participation in living knowledge systems. Institutions engage with these realities whether they articulate them or not.
The task, therefore, is not to resolve uncertainty, but to conduct work within it in ways that do not reproduce harm. This requires institutions capable of holding long horizons, governing complexity, and accepting accountability beyond individual projects or commercial cycles.
That is the level at which serious work in this domain must now be conducted.
