Article

The production of human-wildlife conflict: A political animal geography of encounter

June 2018
Geoforum 95(2)

DOI:10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.06.011

Authors:

Jared Margulies

University of Alabama

Krithi Karanth

Centre for Wildlife Studies

This study examines how transformations of a regional rural economy have produced new geographies of encounter between agricultural communities, their livestock, and carnivores surrounding Bandipur National Park in Karnataka, India. We analyze state discourses of human-wildlife conflict alongside the perspectives of rural agricultural communities about changes in human-wildlife interactions. Our study shows how state narratives about human-wildlife conflict mask more foundational changes in the livelihood strategies of agricultural villages in response both to park management and regional economic transformations, and how these changes are inherently woven into the production of new geographies of human-wildlife encounter. Our results suggest declining tolerance for injury and death of cattle by carnivores represents the cumulative impacts of a transformation of the livestock economy and more aggressive protected area management strategies. This research also suggests how political ecology can maintain its commitments to social justice while becoming more attuned to animals as political actors.

De-and re-peasantization through wolves: A more-than-human political ecology of agrarian change

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2024

Valerio Donfrancesco

While wolves are often described as 'ecological engineers', this article reframes the image of this predator as a socioecological engineer. Adopting a more-than-human political ecology perspective, I highlight the imbrication of wolf agency with the political economy of farming in co-shaping processes of agrarian change in Tuscany, Italy. A multispecies ethnography elucidates how wolves are simultaneously contributing to and undermining a modernization of sheep husbandry practices in the region. This entanglement of wolf agency in processes of de- and re-peasantization is politically relevant, affecting human-wolf relations and local levels of conflict. Through their return, wolves are necessitating shifts in farming practices and affecting the topology of agricultural landscapes, favoring either an intensification of husbandry regimes (i.e., more sheep raised indoors) or a greater competitiveness of family-led free-ranging farms with a high availability of family labor. Emphasizing this aspect is important to politicize current discussions surrounding coexistence, and supports the rise of practices that are considered to be most socially, culturally, and ecologically valuable. A focus on wolf agency in this case entails 'thinking with' wolves in co-designing alternative (co)existences, providing a more nuanced understanding of socioecological change and human-wolf relations. This article informs critical scholarship on the value of moving beyond dualist lenses while still maintaining a focus on structural processes. These are an important though not unidirectional force of change. Reframing wolves as socioecological engineers calls for further research exploring such entanglements of human and non-human agencies in the coproduction of agrarian change and human-wildlife relations.

Руководство КВВ МСОП по конфликтам и сосуществованию человека и дикой природы : Первое издание

Book

Full-text available

Feb 2024

As human-wildlife conflicts become more frequent, serious and widespread worldwide, they are notoriously challenging to resolve, and many efforts to address these conflicts struggle to make progress. These Guidelines provide an essential guide to understanding and resolving human-wildlife conflict. The Guidelines aim to provide foundations and principles for good practice, with clear, practical guidance on how best to tackle conflicts and enable coexistence with wildlife. They have been developed for use by conservation practitioners, community leaders, decision-makers, researchers, government officers and others. Focusing on approaches and tools for analysis and decision-making, they are not limited to any particular species or region of the world.

Context matters when rewilding for climate change

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2024

There is a cross‐sectoral push among conservationists to simultaneously mitigate biodiversity loss and climate change, especially as the latter increasingly threatens the former. Growing evidence demonstrates that animals can have substantial impacts on carbon cycling. As such, there are increasing calls to use animal conservation and rewilding to dually overcome biodiversity loss and mitigate climate change. Specifically, trophic rewilding—which involves restoring intact animal communities, functional roles and trophic structure within food webs, and natural ecosystem processes—utilizes a rewilding framework to simultaneously support biodiversity conservation and carbon capture and storage. Trophic rewilding is a complex conservation approach to mitigating climate change, involving accurate estimations of baseline conditions and continuous monitoring of carbon cycling and species impacts within a system. It is also predicated on garnering social support for both the reintroduction and monitoring of a species, and obtaining the animals themselves. We are excited by the growing interest in this potential, but emphasize that a species' net impact on ecosystem carbon dynamics is context‐dependent. Caution is required whenever biodiversity conservation (including rewilding), climate change mitigation, and human welfare do not readily align. Hence—similar to other nature‐based solutions—these burgeoning efforts must avoid sweeping generalizations. To bolster successful trophic rewilding, we highlight a range of social and ecological context dependencies that can vary outcomes in a rewilded carbon cycle and provide ethical considerations for successful implementation. We conclude with an overview of the available technology to predict and monitor progress toward both biodiversity and climate mitigation goals. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

(Co)producing landscapes of coexistence: A historical political ecology of human-wolf relations in Italy

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2024
GEOFORUM

Valerio Donfrancesco

There is increasing interest in human-wildlife coexistence. In Europe, coexistence with expanding large carnivore populations is a pressing issue. Seeking to inform contemporary management with an historical perspective, this study investigates the formation of human-wolf relations in Italy during critical periods of wolf decline (since the nineteenth century) and comeback (since the closing decades of the twentieth century). Specifically, this study adopts a 'more-than-human political ecology' approach, focused on exploring the entangled influence of non-human agency and wider political economies in the (co)production of human-wildlife relations. Such analysis is used to fill knowledge gaps on these key historical events in carnivore management, which are currently explained from either a more rigid structural angle or depoliticised lenses. The analyses of this study bring together the pivotal work of Italian historians and scholars on topics of capitalist development and wolf ecology, ethology and management in Italy. This work highlights how the onset of capitalism in Italy around the end of the 1700s inadvertently affected the rise of particularly problematic wolf behaviours in that period, which were in turn managed through an intensification of wolf persecution. Wolves co-shaped the need of and desire for their conservation near the end of the 1900s, which alongside the rise of a postmodern capitalist regime promoted the return of wolves in this period. The (re)alignment of wolf conservation with capitalist logics, however, displaced the costs of the wolf's return onto local communities, exacerbating conflict. This study comes with two main implications: first, it problematises fixed representations of non-humans, highlighting instead their adaptive capacities and alterity; second, it further conceives non-humans as in a constant co-becoming with human practices and wider political economies, emphasising the need for structural change for conviviality. These analyses may inform wolf management in Europe and beyond, as well as other contexts of coexistence.

Seeing animals like a state? Divergent forester subjectivities and the managing of human-wildlife conflicts in South India

Article

Nov 2023
GEOFORUM

How do foresters in India understand the foundational and proximate causes of negative interactions between humans and wildlife? In this article we identify five distinct epistemological orientations towards managing human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) and drivers of those conflicts among staff at differing levels of the Indian forest bureaucracy across three protected areas in the Western Ghats. Through an empirical analysis employing Q method, we analyze forester subjectivities in relation to how forests should be managed with HWC mitigation in mind. Our results suggest forester perspectives are informed by social class and rank, geography, and experience. Forester positionality and knowledge is also at times in conflict with hegemonic perspectives of forest departments and can lead to the development of tensions in how foresters think about human-wildlife relations and managing HWC. Our analysis brings together concepts of multiple environmentalities with Gramscian ideas of the incoherent individual to theorize the varying subjectivities of individual state actors in understanding, managing, and co-producing forms of HWC. In doing so, this article contributes to contemporary debates about the theorizing of subject-making in political ecology and geography through an empirical case from one of the most important megafaunal conservation landscapes in Asia.

Human–nature relationships: An introduction to social–ecological practice theory for human–wildlife interactions

Article

Oct 2023

Conservation science requires a balance of social and ecological perspectives to understand human–wildlife interactions. We look for an integrative social–ecological framework that emphasizes equal representation across social and ecological conservation sciences. In this perspective, we suggest “social–ecological practice theory”, an integration of general ecological theory and anthropology’s practice theory, for a conservation-minded social–ecological framework to better theorize human–nature relationships. Our approach deliberately pulls from subdisciplines of anthropology, specifically a body of social theory founded by anthropology and social science called practice theory. We then illustrate how to apply social–ecological practice theory to our case study in the Makgadikgadi region of Botswana. We highlight how the practices of people, lions, and cattle—in combination with environmental and structural features—provide the needed context to deepen the understanding of human–wildlife conflict in the region. Social–ecological practice theory highlights the complexity that exists on the landscape, and may more effectively result in conservation strategies for human–wildlife coexistence.

Evaluating Interventions

Chapter

Full-text available

Mar 2023

Impact evaluations assess the causal link between an action (e.g. erecting a fence) and the outcomes (e.g. a change in the rate of crop raiding by elephants). This goes beyond understanding whether a project has been implemented (e.g. whether activities were completed) to understanding what changes happened due to the actions taken and why they happened as they did. Impact evaluation is thus defined as the systematic process of assessing the effects of an intervention (e.g. project or policy) by comparing what actually happened with what would have happened without it (i.e. the counterfactual)

Social Marketing and Behavior Change

Chapter

Full-text available

May 2023

Historically, conservationists have focused on financial and technical solutions to human-wildlife conflicts (Redpath et al., 2013). It has become clear that although these are important to generate a context where change is possible, more attention to human behaviour is needed to achieve longer-term human-wildlife coexistence (Veríssimo & Campbell, 2015). Interventions targeting human behaviour have been largely focused on measures such as regulation and education. Regulation in this context refers to the system of rules made by a government or other authority, usually backed by penalties and enforcement mechanisms, which describes the way people should behave, while education is concerned with the provision of information about a topic. However, the degree of influence of these interventions depends on the priority audience being motivated (i.e. the individual believes change is in their best interest) and/or able to change (i.e. overcome social pressure, inertia and social norms) (Figure 21) (Smith et al., 2020b).

Attitudes, tolerance and human behavior

Chapter

Full-text available

Mar 2023

The human dimension aspects of conflicts over wildlife are largely determined by the thoughts, feelings and, ultimately, behaviours of people. Because all human-wildlife conflicts involve people, approaches that provide a better understanding of human behaviour – and facilitate behaviour change – are crucially important for helping manage such conflicts. Efforts to mitigate human-wildlife conflict commonly include actions to try to influence or change the attitudes or behaviours of the people involved. Another extremely common approach for reducing human-wildlife conflict is to conduct education and awareness campaigns. These activities are well intentioned in attempting to change the human dimension of the human-wildlife conflict, but unfortunately are often ineffective for one very common reason – they are based on incorrect assumptions about cause-and-effect relationships of concepts within social psychology.

The role of the conservationist

Chapter

Mar 2023

Animal Behaviour

Chapter

Full-text available

Mar 2023

The potential success of wildlife damage prevention measures can be significantly increased by taking the natural behaviour of animals into account, identifying ways in which some species have already adapted to the presence of humans and applying this knowledge elsewhere. It is also important to understand how individual differences in behaviour (animal and human personality) can vary the perception, presence and intensity of conflict from one landscape or conflict location to the next. The chapter includes sections on: Animal decision making - negative impacts on human-dominated landscapes and ‘problem’ animals; key behavioural considerations; HWC scenarios linked to animal behaviour; and concludes with a step-by-step guide to considering animal behaviour in human-wildlife conflict mitigation strategy development.

Introduction

Chapter

Mar 2023

An overview of the IUCN SSC guidelines on human-wildlife conflict and coexistence (First Ed.), covering the global scale of the challenge, thoughts on defining HWC and Coexistence, and some essential considerations for management.

Social Science Research

Chapter

Mar 2023

Engaging with the social, psychological, economic and political dimensions of wildlife management and conservation is essential for robust and effective actions and policies regarding human-wildlife conflicts. Specifically, in the context of human-wildlife conflicts, understanding different interest groups’ perspectives and their different value systems, beliefs, priorities and agendas is necessary to find out how to address challenges for improved actions for people and wildlife. The chapter focuses on the basics of social science and desigining social science research, with a section on ethics, and two case studies.

Culture and Wildlife

Chapter

Mar 2023

Culture influences how people respond to or interact with wildlife, and how they respond to and manage conflicts. Culture is a set of principles, habits and symbols that are learnt and shared; it unites groups of people and influences their worldview and behaviour. Culture is also symbolic, whereby people have a shared understanding of symbolic meaning within their group or society. Culture may differ markedly within nations, regions and even local communities and can change over time. As outlined in Chapter 10 (How histories shape interactions), local cultures and environmental relationships are not static and do not exist in isolation; they are influenced by local and global developments, past and present, and this needs to be taken into consideration when examining or working with human-wildlife conflict.

IUCN SSC guidelines on human-wildlife conflict and coexistence: first edition

Book

Full-text available

Mar 2023

The business of saving cheetahs: Cheetah ecology and the diverse politics at work in human wildlife conflict (HWC) interventions in Namibia

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2022

Suzanne Brandon

This paper is concerned with the intersection of cheetah ecology, human wildlife conflict (HWC), settler colonialism, and private land ownership in Namibia. Cheetahs’ ecological adaptation(s) in Namibia point to the need for a fuller picture of the permutations of conservation and conservation NGOs in Africa. In the case of Namibia, cheetahs’ ecological adaptations to interspecies threats have shaped their territory to be primarily on private commercial farms where they cause HWC. While cheetahs cause HWC on commercial farms and farming communities in Namibia writ large, HWC itself is not the conflict discussed in this research. Rather, HWC is the catalyst for what this paper will analyze to be a conflict between two private sector industries—commercial farming and cheetah conservation. After thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Namibia, this case study suggested diverse politics are at work within the NGOs conservation intervention policies at global, national, and local scales. This research identified a theoretical and conceptual fissure which led to an anomaly in the field of political ecology. This paper will argue HWC is an organizing structure in the business of saving cheetahs. The NGOs studied in Namibia are a service-based industry. They invest in both tangible and intangible conservation services rather than market-based participatory approaches, ecosystem services, and/or economic development. This is illustrative of a shift from market-based conservation to a service-based approach and calls for widening the political ecology lens to account for other cases of NGOs’ on-the-ground conservation business practices in Africa.

Planning and theory of change

Chapter

Full-text available

Apr 2023

What is the change you are trying to make and how do you get there? When it comes down to complex issues such as human-wildlife conflicts, the answers to these questions are not always as simple as they may seem. An understanding of the ecological and social dimensions of human-wildlife conflict itself does not translate naturally into effective management actions. The bridge between what we know and what we do – between where we are standing today and where we want to reach – is planning

From biopower to affirmative biopolitics: A (bio)political ecology of becoming with wolves

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2025
Transactions

Valerio Donfrancesco

Effective, equitable and just strategies for multispecies coexistence are increasingly the focus of research and policy. The critical social sciences, such as political ecology, have been particularly interested in this topic recently, exploring the production of human–wildlife interactions and the resulting (uneven) outcomes for different communities. Within this body of literature, some studies have explored human–wildlife coexistence through Foucauldian lenses of biopower and related governmentalities, which have also been extended through more-than-human analyses. After drawing a distinction between biopower and affirmative biopolitics, whereby the latter concern alternative modes of ‘living with’ in more-than-human societies, beyond forms of control over (human and non-human) life, this study explores the (alternative) production of subjectivities in the contexts of farmer–wolf coexistence in Tuscany, Italy. The approach adopted entailed a 12-month ethnography and semi-structured interviews. On the one hand, exercises of biopower operationalised through truth and neoliberal governmentalities by conservation actors are met by local forms of resistance and contribute to an exacerbation of human–wolf conflict. On the other hand, local manifestations of affirmative biopolitics, wherein wolves are conceived not as objects or means to an end but as subjects of care, may provide more promising bases for coexistence. Nevertheless, local ethical propensities to coexist with wolves are strained and constrained by wider political economies shaping socioeconomic hardships in the agricultural sector. We emphasise the need for a greater recognition of local manifestations of affirmative biopolitics, going beyond problematic exercises of biopower that reduce wolves to providers of services (e.g., ecological or economic), which they may not necessarily deliver. We link affirmative biopolitics to feminist ethics of care, articulating an approach to navigating interspecies violence that is attentive to human and non-human needs and frames caring for wolves as a systemic project. We encourage future studies to continue exploring affirmative biopolitics.

The production-protection nexus: How political-economic processes influence prospects for transformative change in human-wildlife interactions

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2023

The production-protection nexus: How political-economic processes influence prospects for transformative change in human-wildlife interactions

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2023
GLOBAL ENVIRON CHANG

This article advances a novel analytical framework for investigating the influence of political-economic processes in human-wildlife interactions (HWI) to support efforts to transform wildlife conservation governance. To date, the majority of research and advocacy addressing HWI focuses on micro-level processes, while even the small body of existing literature exploring social dimensions of such interactions has largely neglected attention to political-economic forces. This is consonant with efforts to transform conservation policy and practice more broadly, which tend to emphasize “circular” change within current political-economic structures rather than “axial” transformation aiming to transcend these structures themselves. Our analysis thus advances understanding of potential for axial transformation in HWI via confrontation with, and “unmaking” of, constraining political-economic structures. It does so through cross-site analysis of conservation policy and practice in relation to three apex predator species (lions, jaguars and wolves) in varied geographic and socio-political contexts, grounded in qualitative ethnographic study within the different sites by members of an international research team. We explore how the relative power of different political-economic interests within each case influences how the animals are perceived and valued, and how this in turn influences conservation interventions and their impact on HWI within these spaces. We term this analysis of the “production-protection nexus” (the interrelation between process of resource extraction and conservation, respectively) in rural landscapes. We emphasize importance of attention to this formative nexus both within and across specific locales in growing global efforts to transform situations of human-wildlife conflict into less contentious coexistence.

‘They Belong Here’: Understanding the conditions of human-wolf coexistence in north-western Spain.

Chapter

Full-text available

May 2023

Human-Wildlife Coexistence: Business as Usual Conservation or an Opportunity for Transformative Change?

Chapter

Full-text available

May 2023

We critically unpack the term 'coexistence' and discuss its potential to facilitate transformative change in wildlife governance.

Exploring Convivial Conservation in Theory and Practice

Chapter

Full-text available

May 2023

This chapter introduces the edited book 'Convivial Conservation: From Principles to Practice' and synthesises the contributions through exploration of three overarching themes.

Convivial Conservation: From Principles to Practice

Book

Full-text available

May 2023

Global biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate, leading to calls for urgent change in how humans govern, conserve, and live with non-human species. It is argued that this change must be radical and transformative, and must challenge the structures and systems that shape biodiversity conservation. This book brings together a diverse group of authors to explore the potential for transforming biodiversity conservation, focusing on one particular proposal called convivial conservation: a vision, framework, and set of principles for a more socially just, democratic and inclusive form of biodiversity governance. Drawing on a rich mix of disciplinary perspectives and diverse case studies centring on human-wildlife interactions, the authors demonstrate the potential for transformation in biodiversity conservation that supports human-wildlife coexistence. The authors argue that this desired transformation will only be possible if the status quo is truly disrupted, and that convivial conservation has the potential to contribute to this disruption. However, convivial conservation must evolve in response to, and in harmony with, a plurality of ideas and perspectives, and resist becoming another top-down mode of conservation. To this end, a rich mix of visions, ideas, and pathways are put forward to move convivial conservation from principles to practice. The wealth of ideas offered in this collection provide important insights for students, academics, policy-makers, conservation professionals, and anyone who wants to think differently about biodiversity conservation and explore how it can be transformed towards a more just and abundant future.

Human-wildlife conflicts in Latin America: A systematic review of jaguars (Panthera onca) and Andean bears (Tremarctos ornatus)

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2025

Forest cover in Latin America has decreased in recent years due to the expansion of agriculture, forestry, and livestock ranching, exacerbating human-wildlife conflicts (HWC). This study analyzes 22 articles about HWC in Latin America related to the jaguar (Panthera onca) and the Andean bear (Tremarctos ornatus), two symbolic species affected by hunting in retaliation for damage caused to livestock or crops. It identifies the countries, problems caused, and the strategies proposed or applied to resolve them, and determines their effectiveness. Ecuador was the country with the most publications. The most frequent problem for both species was attacks on livestock. The most common strategy applied by communities to manage the HWC was hunting and killing the animal, and the most common strategy proposed by the authors was conservation education. More research is needed on HWC in Latin America, especially on evaluating the effectiveness of strategies to manage them, to better understand the problem and implement effective management measures that prevent negative impacts on people and wildlife.

Re-Constructing Restoration: A Critical Review of the Practice, Politics, and Process of Restoration in Diverse Ecologies

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2024

What does it mean to restore the environment? What is restored, according to whom, and at the expense of what? And when or where does restoration end? Restoration activities often presuppose environmental degradation, and posit a historical state that restoration will re-attain, in turn licensing activities that benefit the relatively powerful rather than the relatively weak. Thus, this article critiques a complex set of interlinked ideas and practices around restoration through reviews of literature in political ecology, urban and environmental studies, and conservation science. It expands upon ideas of restoration and foregrounds an ideology of cure that underlies so much of restoration discourse and practice.

Carnivores as engines for sustainable development

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2024

Attitudes towards causes of and solutions to conflict between humans and Asian elephants

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2024

Many Asian elephant populations inhabit fragmented human‐dominated landscapes. Human–elephant conflict (HEC) has intensified in such regions, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people and elephants each year. Controversy between stakeholders then arises as people debate the merits of HEC mitigation approaches, stifling progress. We conducted a survey to evaluate the opinions of experts, farmers and others who have and have not experienced HEC (n = 611), on the causes of HEC, the importance of, conservation of and co‐existence with elephants, and on the acceptability and effectiveness of potential HEC mitigation methods. Analysis of variance and the Potential for Conflict Index showed that all groups agreed with nine of the 10 causes of HEC assessed, on average. All respondent groups had mostly positive attitudes towards the importance and conservation of elephants. However, farmers exposed to HEC disagreed that people should co‐exist with elephants and supported the view that elephants should be removed from human habitats. All groups agreed on the acceptability and effectiveness of electric fencing, early warning systems with infrasonic call detectors, Global Positioning System collars and geophones. However, there was disparity in views between the experts and other stakeholder groups on the acceptability and effectiveness of restricting elephants to protected areas, and translocation of problem elephants to protected areas away from their capture site or to wild elephant holding grounds. While similar views between stakeholders on many subjects are encouraging for elephant conservation, the disparities identified should be given greater attention when planning HEC management programs to minimize conflict between stakeholders.

An unlikely form of violence: conservation and conflict in the Chilean mountains

Article

Oct 2024
SCOT GEOGR J

This article explores the relationship between legal frameworks, mountain communities and the puma in Chile. Delving into the effects of how pumas’ lives have been reshaped by myriad factors (economy, the law, and global change), we address the question of how ‘killability’ is distributed in one Chilean basin where the species is endangered: the Maule. We pay attention to a three-level relationship that distributes and sets the rules around the right to maim and kill bodies, encompassing the state's, rancher's and puma's intrusions. We explore the distribution of the ‘killable’ as ongoing effects and actions cast upon bodies. These actions shape interspecies and life-death ecological relationships. We continue by deepening into the contextual vulnerability of human and non-human lives forced to compete, or set new agreements, to improve and rearrange state mandates, experiencing the symptoms of an environmental and political crisis in which they must either endure or perish. Finally, we address how the interplay between economy, conservationism and animal lives redistribute the value of, and grievability among, species.

Wild animal attacks and other occupational risks perceived by Indigenous hunters and fishers in the Yangambi landscape

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2024
Hum Dimens Wildl

Hunting and fishing support diverse food systems in tropical forest areas, but carry serious occupational risks. Health and safety at work is important to human wellbeing and constitutes an element of Indigenous rights. This issue has received attention in the regulated sector, but needs additional focus in subsistence and informal economies. We draw on semi-structured interviews with Turumbo hunters and fishers in the Yangambi Biosphere Reserve region (DRC) to assess perceptions of occupational risk, especially attacks from wild animals. Fishers were concerned about drowning and cuts, while hunters cited bad weather and injuries from faulty equipment. There was gender-specific perception of risk from wild animals that reflected different roles: women noted snake bites and wasps, while men feared larger animals. Retaliatory behaviors among respondents included killing various species. The risks associated with fishing and hunting in tropical forests should be addressed in policies that consider the wellbeing of the poor.

Drivers of human–tiger conflict risk and potential mitigation approaches

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2024

Human–wildlife conflict has become a significant challenge for conservationists, particularly in areas where endangered species, such as large carnivores, are recovering. If we fail to keep a balance between the interests of humans and wildlife, the human–wildlife conflict can have adverse outcomes. However, the drivers of human–wildlife conflict, and how to mitigate conflict, are often poorly understood. In this study, we aimed to explore the possible causes for and potential mitigating approaches to human–tiger conflict risks through spatiotemporal niche partitioning. Based on data from the reports of Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) preying on cattle and camera trap detection data from 2014 to 2019 in Hunchun, Northeast China, we predicted Amur tiger occurrence and created risk maps of human–tiger potential encounters. We found that Amur tiger occurrence was positively driven by prey distribution and negatively by the distribution of pastures used for domestic cattle grazing. Livestock was increasingly predated in areas with limited preferred prey, that is, wild pig (Sus scrofa) and sika (Cervus nippon), and in closer proximity to cattle‐grazing land. On the basis of our models, we divided areas utilized by human and Amur tigers into low‐, medium‐, and high‐risk areas across multiple spatiotemporal scales. We suppose that multiple spatiotemporal scale niche partitioning management might effectively reduce the risk of human–tiger encounters, prompt harmonized coexistence between humans and tigers, and provide new solutions to other areas experiencing human–wildlife conflicts.

Activating uncertainty: Scientific evidence and environmental values in wildlife management

Article

May 2024
GEOFORUM

The agency of urban carnivores in human politics: leopards in Mumbai, India

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2024
FRONT ECOL ENVIRON

Across the world, increasing urbanization is leading to more frequent encounters between humans and wildlife. The resulting cohabitation promotes new human–wildlife dynamics in cities and requires innovative approaches for coping with wildlife in habitats that are not conventionally considered as suitable. Here we examined how leopards (Panthera pardus) acclimate to the urban environment in Mumbai, India, and influence human politics through their presence, adaptability, and diverse relationships with humans and nonhumans. Building on perspectives from political ecology and more‐than‐human geography, we show how leopards may thwart the outcomes of wildlife conservation and management and also catalyze transitions toward approaches that foster coexistence. We reveal the political role that leopards play in Mumbai by examining the many ways in which they influence power dynamics among humans. Our analysis illustrates how including considerations about the political agency of wildlife in urban planning can improve nature conservation and social policies.

Policy Mobilities, Infrastructures, and Nonhuman Political Agency

Article

Nov 2023

More-than-human political geographies: Abjection and sovereign power

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023
POLIT GEOGR

Larissa Fleischmann

This article unravels the processes of abjection that render certain nonhumans as abject, devoid of value and amenable to elimination and killing. It argues that these processes play a constitutive role in practices of statemaking and sovereign power. Abjection works towards the exclusion and rejection of certain parts of a supposed socio-material order, which, for one reason or another, confuse dominant categorizations, trespass certain spatial boundaries or challenge socially produced distinctions and hierarchies (Bataille, 1970 [1934]; Kristeva, 1982). Abjected nonhumans thus regularly become the target of state-induced practices of elimination and culling – as is the case, for instance, with species classified as ‘invasive’, as ‘pests’, as ‘biosecurity threat’ or as ‘disease reservoirs’. Yet, abjection also points to the ability of nonhumans to unsettle, challenge and confuse dominant boundaries and established orders. Abject beings inhabit “unruly edges” (Tsing, 2012) from which they challenge and transcend sovereign impulses to order, govern and eliminate their existence. Taking cue from previous works on abjection and sovereign power, on the one hand, and works on the role of nonhumans in political processes, on the other, I argue that abjection and state-making are not only intertwined but also crucially played out in relation to nonhuman forms of life and death. My wider conceptual aim is to illustrate what an engagement with processes of abjection has to offer for the agenda of more-than-human political geographies

Does Livestock Loss Affect Livelihood? An Investigation on Char Residing Mishing Community of Assam

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2023

Char areas are one of the important geographical structures of Assam covering about state’s 5% of total land with about 10% of total population. Mishings are the second largest tribe of Assam inhabitant mostly in Char areas of Upper Assam. Livestock plays an important role in the Mishing community from both socio-cultural as well as economic point of view and amongst all; pigs have a significant importance among the community. The study comes with objectives of understanding the role of livestock and the effect of livestock loss amongst the Mishing char dwellers and their adaptation behavior (if any) to smoothen their income fluctuations due to loss of livestock. While studying these issues, the piggery sector is given much importance since along with economic, pig has a great social importance too. The study is influenced by the idea of ethnographic research, using both quantitative and qualitative approach to achieve the proposed objectives. The study presents that the loss of livestock due to both disease and disaster has a significant impact on the vulnerability of the Mishing char dwellers and the share of loss of piggery is found to have greater contribution towards it. The study recommends the need for policies to be taken to tackle the issues and the enhancement in the adaptation techniques that has been taken by the char dwellers.

Conservation amidst Urbanization: Insights from Explorations around Bannerghatta National Park, Bengaluru

Article

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Jul 2023

Advocacy, Ecotourism, and Biopolitics of Whale Conservation in Ecuador

Article

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Jul 2023

Bradley Tatar

Whale-watching tourism in Ecuador thrives through the spectacular image of a flagship species, the humpback whale. Seemingly, it is an example of an industry regulated and managed in accordance with sustainable principles of nature conservation, thanks to the work of Ecuadorian scientists who advocate for policies to protect whales from harmful exploitation. However, does the use of the whale as an icon of conservation result in its utilization as a mere commodity for profit? Through ethnographic fieldwork including interviews, observations, and textual analysis, it is shown that the Ecuadorian practices of whale conservation have resulted in the whale becoming a subject of governance, by which the wild animals are recognized as entities worthy of ethical treatment. Using the humpback whale as a flagship species, the Ecuadorian scientists practice biopolitics through the strategies of categorizing, monitoring, and regulating human interactions with the whale population. The success of this approach to wildlife governance highlights the role of NGO-affiliated scientists as knowledge producers and policy advocates.

Using the centre-periphery framework to explore human-carnivore relations

Article

Jul 2023

Living alongside carnivores can incur both costs and benefits on people's lifeways. While positive outcomes of carnivore presence can foster coexistence, negative relations with carnivores can trigger carnivores' killing and undermine their conservation. In response to this, conservation efforts increasingly focus on promoting positive human-carnivore relations, most often through improvements in the flow of economic benefits from carnivores to local communities. However, there is a question mark over the effectiveness and potential consequences of market-based instruments for carnivore conservation. To understand the opportunities and pitfalls of market-based instruments for carnivore conservation, we use a centre-periphery framework to compare human-carnivore relations in two pastoral systems with uneven market-based conservation efforts across Kenya. We conducted 230 semi-structured interviews on costs and benefits, mitigation strategies and self-reported propensity to kill carnivores. Our study shows how different human-carnivore relations are enacted in areas with uneven market-based conservation efforts. We found that the extent to which benefits are attributed to alive carnivores is largely shaped by the existence of market-based conservation efforts in the area. Our results also document an openly self-reported propensity to kill carnivores in places where market-based conservation efforts are meagre at best. A more robust understanding of the effectiveness of market-based instruments for carnivore conservation is essential to sustain positive human-carnivore relations into the future.

Good, quarrelsome, bad: animal agency and human- elephant interactions in the Western Ghats, India OPEN ACCESS EDITED BY

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2023

Ecological breakdowns are posing many serious threats to the lives of both humans and wild animals in the spaces where those lives are shared. Today the intensification of conservation-related conflict is one of the main ecological challenges faced in the Western Ghats of India. This article explores some of the complex interactions between different groups of people, such as wealthy farmers, small-scale farmers, and Adivasi (indigenous) people, and Asian elephants and suggests potentially non-conflictual approaches to sharing spaces with these elephants. The study used a multispecies ethnographic approach as a primary research method and focused on detailed stories and anecdotes narrated by the inhabitants of the study area who had long experience of living with these elephants and who frequently encountered them. Based on insights offered by the stories and anecdotes, the article argues that the lives of elephants and those of people are deeply and intimately interconnected and co-constructed in the study area; such 'naturecultures' of elephants and humans constitute a complex whole. The stories highlight that most people in the study area know that elephants have agency and are intelligent, emotional beings, and can subvert human attempts to control them. According to local people, each individual elephant possesses a distinct personality: some are good, some are quarrelsome, and some are bad. People believe that, just as human beings do, elephants also perceive and respond to individual humans differently; such beliefs, and the stories created out of them, are non-anthropocentric in nature. Overall, this article explores how understanding, and treating seriously, the concepts, beliefs, and experiences of multidimensional elephant agency can be beneficial for envisioning possible new ways for human-elephant coexistence.

Limits and limitations: doing animal geographies at the Korean demilitarised zone (DMZ)

Article

Oct 2024

Madelaine Joyce

Estimating the impact of wildlife damage compensation policy on farmers’ incomes

Article

Sep 2024
J NAT CONSERV

Animal Geographies

Chapter

Aug 2024

Abject lives: An introduction

Article

Apr 2024
POLIT GEOGR

Chapter 1. Political and affective ecologies of human-elephant relations

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2023

Bad Wolves? Political Ecology of Responsibility and More-Than-Human Perspectives in Human–Wildlife Interactions

Article

May 2023

Natur im Konflikt. Konzeptualisierungen des Nichtmenschlichen in der Forschung zu Umweltkonflikten

Technical Report

Full-text available

Sep 2023

Umweltkonflikte sind Gegenstand aktueller Forschungen in Natur- und Sozialwissenschaften. In diesem Diskussionspapier skizzieren wir, welche verschiedenen Forschungsrichtungen sich mit Umweltkonflikten beschäftigen und wie dabei das Nicht-menschliche im Konflikt, beispielsweise Tiere, Pflanzen, Wälder oder Wasser, konzeptualisiert wird. Abschließend argumentieren wir, dass viele existierende Forschungsrichtungen dem Nichtmenschlichen eine aktive Wirkung zusprechen, eine explizite und umfassende Konzeptualisierung jedoch häufig fehlt. ______ Environmental conflicts are the subject of current research in the natural and social sciences. In this discussion paper, we outline which different research directions deal with environmental conflicts and how the non-human in the conflict, for example animals, plants, forests or water, is conceptualised. Finally, we argue that while much of existing research attributes an active effect to the non-human, an explicit and comprehensive conceptualisation is often lacking.

Conditions of Conflict: Exploring Pastoralist Resettlement in Relation to African Lion Conservation

Article

Sep 2023

Human-Wildlife Interactions in Urban Asia

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2023

While urban areas may not seem conducive to human-wildlife interactions (HWI), rapid land use transformations can result in frequent encounters with wildlife in the context of changing habitats, as well as encounters with species that thrive in urban settings. In Asia, the processes of rapid land-use change can bring into sharp relief the juxtaposition of biodiversity hotspots with urban space. This provides an interesting context to study human-wildlife interactions, and also gives considerable scope for input into sustainable urban design worldwide. We conducted a structured review of published literature on HWI across urban southern and eastern Asia. Within the extracted literature, we investigated the framing of the interactions, as HWI have been predominantly perceived through the lens of dualistic antagonism and framed by paradigms of conflict, however there is also substantial discourse emphasizing interspecific coexistence. Invertebrates, mammals and birds occurred most commonly in the abstracts included in our review, with examples of conflict and coexistence common among all three taxonomic groups. Very few studies mentioned amphibians, reptiles and fish. Within each taxonomic group excluding amphibians, at least 50 % of interactions with humans were framed as conflicts. Humans were presented as causing conflict or negative impact on animals in the majority of studies on amphibians, birds, fish and insects, while mammals and lizards were more often considered to negatively impact humans. Our study illustrates the variety and complexity of human-wildlife interactions in Asia that need to be taken into account when planning sustainable urban designs.

Proximity to human settlements can reduce vigilance, but increase alarm call responses in African antelopes

Article

May 2023
ANIM BEHAV

Species and sites matter: Understanding human-wildlife interactions from 5,000 surveys in India

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2018

Introduction: Understanding and managing human–wildlife interactions remains a global conservation priority. Most often, these interactions that emerge from literature focus on negative interactions such as crop damage, livestock loss, property dam- age, human injury and death (Treves and Karanth 2003; Graham et al. 2005; Madden 2004; Lagendijk and Gusset 2008; Dickman 2010; Kansky and Knight 2014). Little effort is exerted towards documenting neutral or positive inter- actions between people and wildlife (Peterson et al. 2010). Despite a vast body of literature devoted to understanding human–wildlife interactions – particularly conflict – many fundamental questions remain unanswered. At the core of these interactions is examining how different species influence people’s perceptions, attitudes, reporting of conflict and retaliation against species and whether these differences can enable improvements in policy, compensation and mitigation efforts (Bagchi and Mishra 2006; Barlow et al. 2010; Dickman 2010; Karanth and Kudalkar 2017). In our multi-site, multi-species evaluation and comparison of conflict across India, we adopt an approach that focuses on understanding conflict from a species perspective. Specifically, we examine crop and livestock loss reported by households to understand differences at the species and site level. We might expect some herbivore species to exhibit different preferences for specific crops and carnivore species to exhibit different preferences for livestock (such as elephants versus pigs or deer, felids versus canids). We also expect differences in loss experienced to be a function of environmental and landscape-level factors at local site level that influence species differently (Michalski et al. 2006; Karanth et al. 2013b). Lastly, we are interested in examining if mitigation measures used by people have an effect on conflict. Although conflict is often localised, we are interested in discerning commonalities among groups of species (for example canids or felids) that might help target mitigation efforts (White and Ward 2010). Our large database (over 5,000 surveys) combined with incidents attributed to 12 species (across 11 study sites) in India allows us to explore these questions in a systematic and robust manner. Our efforts will help disentangle the multiple dimensions of human–wildlife interactions, especially with respect to developing targeted species programmes. This is much needed in a country where 81,000 conflict incidents were reported and compensated for in one year, and there exist wide variations in how species are covered by states (Karanth and Kudalkar 2017).

The Conservation Ideological State Apparatus

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2018

Jared Margulies

This article considers Louis Althusser’s theory of the ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) for advancing political ecology scholarship on the functioning of the state in violent environments. I reflect on a series of events in which a state forest department in South India attempted to recast violent conflicts between themselves and local communities over access to natural resources and a protected area as a debate over human-wildlife conflicts. Through the example of conservation as ideology in Wayanad, Kerala, I show how the ISAs articulate the functioning of ideology within the state apparatuses in order for us to understand the larger mechanics of the state apparatus and the reproduction of the relations of production necessary for the reproduction of capitalism. Revisiting the ISAs as a theoretical framework for studies in political ecology and conservation is timely given the resurgence of militarised conservation tactics, the emancipatory aims of Althusser’s theory, and political ecology’s turn towards praxis.

Political Ecologies of the State: Recent interventions and questions going forward

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2017
POLIT GEOGR

Leila M. Harris

Introduction for special section on political ecologies of the state. Free access until late June, 2017: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Uv-m3Qu6uJtP5

Political Geography and the environment

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2016
POLIT GEOGR

A conceptual framework for understanding illegal killing of large carnivores

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2016

The growing complexity and global nature of wildlife poaching threaten the survival of many species worldwide and are outpacing conservation efforts. Here, we reviewed proximal and distal factors, both social and ecological, driving illegal killing or poaching of large carnivores at sites where it can potentially occur. Through this review, we developed a conceptual social-ecological system framework that ties together many of the factors influencing large carnivore poaching. Unlike most conservation action models, an important attribute of our framework is the integration of multiple factors related to both human motivations and animal vulnerability into feedbacks. We apply our framework to two case studies, tigers in Laos and wolverines in northern Sweden, to demonstrate its utility in disentangling some of the complex features of carnivore poaching that may have hindered effective responses to the current poaching crisis. Our framework offers a common platform to help guide future research on wildlife poaching feedbacks, which has hitherto been lacking, in order to effectively inform policy making and enforcement.

A political ecology of REDD+: Property rights, militarised protectionism, and carbonised exclusion in Cross River

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2016
GEOFORUM

Adeniyi Peter Asiyanbi

This paper offers a critical assessment of REDD+ in Nigeria through a political ecology perspective. Focusing on questions of property rights and resource access, it maps the discursive articulations and contestations through which carbon rights are being determined. It also shows how these articulations and contestations are linked to land and forest rights, and how they shape everyday access to the forest. Evidence from the Nigerian case suggests that factors that complicate rights and undermine access to resources for forest communities under REDD+ are immanent to the contested terrain constituted in part by REDD+ proposals, proponents’ discourses and practices geared towards securing the forest for REDD+. Efforts to secure property rights and guarantee the permanence of REDD+ forests align with economic, ecological and ideological aspirations of state and non-state actors to produce a regime of militarised protectionism. I demonstrate how, in addition to its material and symbolic facilitation of the emergent carbon forestry economy, militarised protectionism as a regime of exclusion also constitutes collateral political economies of ‘more-than-carbon’ forest resources (such as timber and non-timber forest products) which perpetuate capital accumulation by the elites. It is this kind of exclusion–accumulation dialectic, legitimised by carbon forestry claims that this paper describes as carbonised exclusion. The paper thus furthers debates on the political ecology of REDD+ and other carbon forestry projects, while productively engaging technocentric literature on REDD+ and property rights.

An interdisciplinary review of current and future approaches to improving human-predator relations

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2017
CONSERV BIOL

In a world of shrinking habitats and increasing competition for natural resources, potentially dangerous predators bring the challenges of coexisting with wildlife sharply into focus. Through interdisciplinary collaboration between authors trained in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, this paper offers a review of current approaches and a vision for future approaches to understanding and mitigating adverse human-predator encounters. The paper first reviews some limitations to current approaches to mitigation. Second, it reviews an emerging interdisciplinary literature, identifying key perspectives on how to better frame and therefore successfully mitigate such conservation conflicts. Third, it discusses the implications for future research and management practice. It is concluded that a demand for rapid, 'win-win' solutions for conservation and development favours dispute resolution and technical fixes, obscuring important underlying drivers of conflicts. Without due cognisance of these underlying drivers, our well intentioned efforts, focussed on 'human wildlife conflicts,' will fail. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Selling green militarization: The discursive (re)production of militarized conservation in the Virunga National Park, Democratic Republic of the Congo

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2016
GEOFORUM

In recent years, the militarization of nature conservation has intensified, especially in protected areas located in conflict zones or plagued by ‘poaching crises’. Such ‘green militarization’ is enabled by a range of discursive techniques that allow it to be seen as a ‘normal’ and ‘legitimate’ response. This article analyzes these techniques in relation to the Virunga National Park, located in the war-ridden east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where militarized approaches to conservation have a long lineage. It demonstrates that many of the discursive techniques that are currently at play show strong continuities with the past. These include moral boundary-drawing grounded in colonial tropes that accomplish the (racial) Othering of poachers and rebels, and the long-established practice of invoking states of emergency as part of wider mechanisms of securitization. However, the rise of neoliberal conservation, with its emphasis on marketing and marketization, has induced transformations in the employed discursive techniques. Notably, it has intensified the spectacularization of militarized conservation and anchored it in everyday consumer practices, by actively inviting individual supporters to directly fund militarized interventions, thus generating ‘militarization by consumption’. This shows that ‘green militarization’ is not only driven by the growing commodification of nature conservation, but is increasingly subject to commodification itself.

The political ecology of human-wildlife conflict: Producing wilderness, insecurity, and displacement in the Limpopo National Park

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2016

Francis Masse

Like conservation-induced displacement, human-wildlife conflict (HWC) has potentially negative implications for communities in and around protected areas. While the ways in which displacement emerges from the creation of ‘wilderness’ conservation landscapes are well documented, how the production of ‘wilderness’ articulates with intensifications in HWC remains under examined both empirically and conceptually. Using a political-ecological approach, I analyse increases of HWC in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park (LNP) and the subsequent losses of fields and livestock, as well as forms of physical displacement suffered by resident communities. While intensifications of encounters between wildlife on the one hand and people and livestock on the other result in part from increases in wildlife populations, I argue that HWC and the ways in which it constitutes and contributes to various forms of displacement results more centrally from changing relations between wildlife and people and the power and authority to manage conflict between them. Both of these contributing factors, moreover, are the consequence of practices that aim to transform the LNP into a wilderness landscape of conservation and tourism. HWC and its negative impacts are thus not natural phenomena, but are the result of political decisions to create a particular type of conservation landscape.

Co-Adaptation Is Key to Coexisting with Large Carnivores

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2016
TRENDS ECOL EVOL

Co-Adaptation Is Key to Coexisting with Large Carnivores

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2016
TRENDS ECOL EVOL

There is a pressing need to integrate large carnivore species into multi-use landscapes outside protected areas. However, an unclear understanding of coexistence hinders the realization of this goal. We provide a comprehensive conceptualization of coexistence in which mutual adaptations by both large carnivores and humans play a central role.

Why Has Human–Carnivore Conflict Not Been Resolved in Namibia?

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2016

Human–wildlife conflict has historically been portrayed as a management problem where solutions lie in technical changes or financial incentives. However, recent research shows many conflicts stem from social, economic, and political drivers. We undertook qualitative data collection on livestock farms to determine whether relationships between farmers and their workers affected frequency of reported livestock depredation in Namibia. We found that the conflict was affected by social and economic inequalities embedded in the previous apartheid regime. Macro- and microlevel socioeconomic problems created an environment where livestock depredation was exacerbated by unmotivated farm workers. Poor treatment of workers by farmers resulted in vengeful behaviors, such as livestock theft and wildlife poaching. Successfully addressing this situation therefore requires recognition and understanding of its complexity, rather than reducing it to its most simplistic parts.

Ambiguous Geographies: Connecting Case Study Knowledge with Global Change Science

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2016

Case studies have long been a gold standard for investigating causal mechanisms in human–environment interactions. Yet it remains a challenge to generalize across case studies to produce knowledge at broader regional and global scales even as the effort to do so, mostly using metastudy methods, has accelerated. One major obstacle is that the geographic context of case study knowledge is often presented in a vague and incomplete form, making it difficult to reuse and link with the regional and global contexts within which it was produced and is therefore most relevant. Here we assess the degree to which the quality of geographic description in published land change case studies limits their effective reuse in spatially explicit global and regional syntheses based on 437 spatially bounded cases derived from 261 case studies used in published land change metastudies. Common ambiguities in published representations of case geographic contexts were identified and scored using three indicators of geographic data quality for reuse in spatially explicit regional and global metastudy research. Statistically significant differences in the quality of case geographic descriptions were evident among the six major disciplinary categories examined, with the earth and planetary sciences evidencing greater clarity and conformance scores than other disciplines. The quality of case geography reporting showed no statistically significant improvement over the past fifty years. By following a few simple and readily implemented guidelines, case geographic context reporting could be radically improved, enabling more effective case study reuse in regional to global synthesis research, thereby yielding substantial benefits to both case study and synthesis researchers.

Breed contra Beef - The Making of Piedmontese Cattle

Chapter

Full-text available

Jan 2015

GLOBE: Analytics for Assessing Global Representativeness

Conference Paper

Full-text available

Aug 2014

The goal of meta-analysis is to synthesize results from a collection of studies in order to identify patterns that have broader applicability. In many of the global change sciences, these synthesis studies attempt to bring together results of local case studies to make claims about global patterns. In order to substantiate claims of generality, it is crucial to establish that the collected case studies are representative of the regions they claim to characterize. Said differently, a meta-analyst must demonstrate that their choice of studies was not biased in a way that would undermine her claims. The GLOBE project aims to shorten the gap between local and global researchers by, among other things, providing analytics that help assess the representativeness of a collection of study sites and assist in correcting any bias found. In this paper we present the methods used by GLOBE to formalize the concept of representativeness, to analyze and visualize it, to address sampling bias, and present a use case in the domain of land change science.

War, by Conservation

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2015
GEOFORUM

Rosaleen Duffy

In this paper I argue that there has been a critical shift towards war by conservation in which conservation, security and counter insurgency (COIN) are becoming more closely integrated. In this new phase concerns about global security constitute important underlying drivers, while biodiversity conservation is of secondary importance. This is a significant break from earlier phases of fortress conservation and war for biodiversity. In order to develop a better understanding of these shifts, this paper analyzes the existing conceptual approaches, notably environmental security which seeks to understand how resources cause or shape conflict, and political ecology approaches that focus on the struggles over access to and control over resources. However, this paper indicates the limitations of these existing debates for understanding recent shifts, which require a fresh approach. I chart the rise of the narrative I call poachers-as-terrorists, which relies on the invocation of the idea that ivory is the white gold of Jihad, a phrase which is closely associated with an Elephant Action League (EAL) report in 2012 which claimed Al Shabaab used ivory to fund its operations. This narrative is being extended and deepened by a powerful alliance of states, conservation NGOs, Private Military Companies and international organizations, such that it is shaping policies, especially in areas of US geo-strategic interest in Sub-Saharan Africa. As a result conservation is becoming a core element of a global security project, with significant implications for conceptual debates and for conservation practice on the ground.

Accumulation by securitization: Commercial poaching, neoliberal conservation, and the creation of new wildlife frontiers

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2015
GEOFORUM

Part of a broader interest in the escalating securitization of conservation practice, scholars are beginning to take note of an emerging relationship between conservation–securitization, capital accumulation, and dispossession. We develop the concept of accumulation by securitization to better grasp this trend, positioning it in the critical literatures on neoliberal conservation, green grabbing, and conservation-security. The concept captures the ways in which capital accumulation, often tied to land and resource enclosure, is enabled by practices and logics of security. Security logics, moreover, increasingly provoke the dispossession of vulnerable communities, thereby enabling accumulation. We ground the concept by turning to the Greater Lebombo Conservancy (GLC) in the Mozambican borderlands. This is a new privately-held conservancy built as a securitized buffer zone to obstruct the movement of commercial rhino poachers into South Africa’s adjacent Kruger National Park. We show how wildlife tourism-related accumulation here is enabled by, and in some ways contingent upon, the GLC’s success in curbing poaching incursions, and, relatedly, how security concerns become the grounds upon which resident communities are displaced. In terms of the latter, we suggest security provides a troubling, depoliticized alibi for dispossession. Like broader neoliberal conservation and green grabbing, we illustrate how accumulation by securitization plays out within complex new networks of state and private actors. Yet these significantly expand to include including security actors and others motivated by security concerns.

Tilting at wildlife: Reconsidering human-wildlife conflict

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2014

Conflicts between people over wildlife are widespread and damaging to both the wildlife and people involved. Such issues are often termed human–wildlife conflicts. We argue that this term is misleading and may exacerbate the problems and hinder resolution. A review of 100 recent articles on human–wildlife conflicts reveals that 97 were between conservation and other human activities, particularly those associated with livelihoods. We suggest that we should distinguish between human–wildlife impacts and human–human conflicts and be explicit about the different interests involved in conflict. Those representing conservation interests should not only seek technical solutions to deal with the impacts but also consider their role and objectives, and focus on strategies likely to deliver long-term solutions for the benefit of biodiversity and the people involved.

Elephants over the Cliff: Explaining Wildlife Killings in Tanzania

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2015
LAND USE POLICY

Many incidents of elephant killings have recently taken place in Tanzania as well as in other African countries. Such events are usually presented as results of the rising global demand for ivory. As we show in this case study, however, not all violence against elephants is driven by the ivory trade. This article presents an event that occurred in West Kilimanjaro in 2009 when numerous villagers chased a herd of elephants over a cliff, killing six of them. Using a ‘web of relations’ approach, we seek to uncover the underlying as well as the immediate factors that led to this incident. A severe drought sparked off the event as elephants increasingly raided crops and destroyed water pipes. There are growing elephant and human populations in the area, which must be understood in the context of land use changes. Large areas have in various ways been turned into different types of protected areas during the last few decades as results of efforts by conservation NGOs and governmental agencies. In between these areas, people try to sustain a living on the remaining land, while encountering increased problems with wildlife. Conservation in the study area takes place without local communities having any real influence on decision-making. This leads to a feeling of being marginalized and disempowered, which again causes resistance to conservation.

Accumulation by Conservation

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2014

Following the financial crisis and its aftermath, it is clear that the inherent contradictions of capitalist accumulation have become even more intense and plunged the global economy into unprecedented turmoil and urgency. Governments, business leaders and other elite agents are frantically searching for a new, more stable mode of accumulation. Arguably the most promising is what we call ‘Accumulation by Conservation’ (AbC): a mode of accumulation that takes the negative environmental contradictions of contemporary capitalism as its departure for a newfound ‘sustainable’ model of accumulation for the future. Under slogans such as payments for environmental services, the Green Economy, and The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, public, private and non-governmental sectors seek ways to turn the non-material use of nature into capital that can simultaneously ‘save’ the environment and establish long-term modes of capital accumulation. In the paper, we conceptualise and interrogate the grand claim of AbC and argue that it should be seen as a denial of the negative environmental impacts of ‘business as usual’ capitalism. We evaluate AbC’s attempt to compel nature to pay for itself and conclude by speculating whether this dynamic signals the impending end of the current global cycle of accumulation altogether.

Political Ecology of Conservation: some theoretical genealogies

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2013

This article explicitly connects a growing body of specific literature, the political ecology of conservation, to some of the often overlooked, main conceptual components emerging from political anthropology and geography (sources of legitimacy, governmentality, territoriality, or state making), political economy (commoditization, market integration, niche markets, or gentrification), and cultural studies of the environment (cultural transformations of nature, cultural heritage and landscapes, taste, and identity politics). All these concepts and literary fields are at the basis of the contemporary social analysis of conservation policies and their consequences. The article also provides an updated large bibliography on the concepts potentially relevant to a political ecology of conservation. Key Words: conservation, governmentality, taste, nature, commoditization of nature, territoriality

Conservation’s blind spot: The case for conflict transformation in wildlife conservation

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2014
BIOL CONSERV

Unaddressed or poorly addressed conflicts present increasingly difficult obstacles to effective conservation and management of many wildlife species around the world. The material, visible manifestations of such conflicts are often rooted in less visible, more complex social conflicts between people and groups. Current efforts to incorporate stakeholder engagement typically do not fully acknowledge or address the social conflicts that lie beneath the surface of conservation issues, nor do they consistently create the necessary conditions for productive transformation of the root causes of conflict. Yet, the ultimate level of social carrying capacity for many species will depend on the extent to which conservation can reconcile these social conflicts, thereby increasing social receptivity to conservation goals. To this end, conservation conflict transformation (CCT) offers a new perspective on, and approach to, how conservationists identify, understand, prevent, and reconcile conflict. Principles and processes from the peacebuilding field inform CCT and offer useful guidance for revealing and addressing social conflicts to improve the effectiveness of conservation efforts. The Human-Wildlife Conflict Collaboration (HWCC) has adapted and demonstrated these principles for application in conservation through capacity building and conflict interventions, transforming how many practitioners in the conservation field address conflict. In this article, we discuss current limitations of practice when addressing conflict in conservation, define conflict transformation, illustrate two analytical models to orient the reader to the benefits of CCT, and present two case studies where CCT was applied usefully to a conservation-related conflict.

Introduction: Tactics of Multispecies Ethnography

Chapter

Jan 2014

Coffee, Trees, and Labor: Political Economy of Biodiversity in Commodity Agroforests

Article

Sep 2020

Tropical and subtropical plantation agriculture has been shown to be compatible with the conservation of biodiversity, but the specific practices, conditions, and farmer strategies associated with such diversity remain poorly understood. In the ecologically rich region of India’s Western Ghats, specifically, farm-scale tree species diversity is a key structural condition explaining avian diversity. Surveying a sample of coffee plantations in the region, we examine farm-scale conditions that give rise to biodiversity. Results suggest that larger plantation size, recent increase in canopy density, and the cultivation of Coffea arabica varieties all encourage tree species diversity necessary for habitat. Results also suggest, however, that these structural conditions are more labor and pesticide intensive. These findings raise some serious questions about the sustainability of biodiversity in this context and suggest difficult trade-offs under conditions of demographic transition, declining labor availability, and concern about chemical inputs all encourage tree species diversity necessary for habitat. Results also suggest, however, that these structural conditions are more labor and pesticide intensive. These findings raise some serious questions about the sustainability of biodiversity in this context and suggest difficult trade-offs under conditions of demographic transition, declining labor availability, and concern about chemical inputs.

Compensation payments, procedures and policies towards human-wildlife conflict management: Insights from India

Article

Sep 2018
BIOL CONSERV

The effectiveness of compensation payments in mitigating and resolving human-wildlife conflict is globally debated. We examined procedures, types, and payments made for incidents reported in India from 2010 to 2015. Among India's 29 states, 22 (76%) compensated for crop loss, 18 (62%) for property damage, 26 (90%) for livestock depredation, and 28 (97%) for human injury or death. In 2012–2013, a total of 78,656 conflict incidents were reported from 18 states with complete data. Of these incidents, 73.4% were crop loss and property damage, 20% livestock predation, 6.2% human injury, and 0.4% human death. In 2012–2013, payments totalled

5,332,762 (ranging from

0 for no reported incidents in Tripura to

1,956,115 for 36,091 incidents in Karnataka). The average expenditures per incident were

47 for crop and property damage,

74 for livestock,

103 for human injury and $3224 for human death. These numbers underestimate the total extent of conflict because of low reporting rates and unavailability of complete records from all states. We found a lack of policies in some states, while others have low payment amounts along with high transaction costs. Despite a significant Indian government mandate supporting compensation payments in India, there exist inconsistencies in eligibility, application, assessment, implementation, and payment procedures across states. Ensuring that compensation reaches all affected people requires standardizing these processes in a transparent and efficient manner, while also monitoring its perceived benefits to wildlife conservation.

Approaching human-animal relationships from multiple angles: A synthetic perspective

Article

Aug 2018
BIOL CONSERV

Animal geographies III: Species relations of power

Article

May 2018

Alice J. Hovorka

In this final report on animal geographies, I address species relations of power. These relations reflect the relative power held by various animal groups, as expressed in their circumstances and experiences and as mediated through human-animal dynamics. Investigating the breadth and complexity of these power dynamics is important given that we live in a multispecies world and we continue to seek avenues for de-centring ‘the human’ in theory and practice. Animal geographies offer scholarly tools through which to explore, unpack, and interrogate multispecies hierarchical networks. The result is a holistic, in-depth view of relations of power that illuminates how animal social groups are bound up with humans, as well as with other animals, in ways that produce and reproduce species-based differences and inequalities.

Furthering post-human political ecologies

Article

Mar 2018
GEOFORUM

This critical review aims to facilitate explicit, ongoing consideration for how post-human geographies and political ecology stand to benefit one another empirically and theoretically. In it, we argue that post-human political ecologies are well-equipped to ensure that the broader post-human turn in geographical thought engages critically with the roles that humans and non-humans play in enactments of injustice – both as subjects of (in) justice and as beings whose actions have justice implications for myriad forms of life. By engaging with empirics drawn from research on tiger conservation in India, we deploy myth as a conceptual tool and as an heuristic device to illustrate how post-human political ecologies might further engage with the politics and power asymmetries embedded in conservation science and practice. To conclude, this critical review summarizes the merits of bringing the ‘cutting edge’ of post-human geographical literature into dialogue with the traditional concerns of political ecology and recaps the potential power that myth retains as an analytic in post-human political ecologies.

Understanding Human–Wildlife Conflicts and Their Implications

Chapter

Jan 2018

History, Location, and Species Matter: Insights for Human–Wildlife Conflict Mitigation From India

Article

Jun 2017
Hum Dimens Wildl

Preventing loss of crops, threats to livestock, damage to property, and human injury and death attributed to wildlife are conservation challenges. We surveyed over 5,000 households around 11 reserves in India to examine these issues and mitigation efforts. Crops were lost by 71% of households, livestock by 17%, and human injury and death were reported by 3% of households (losses attributed to 32 species). Households deployed 12 mitigation measures with nighttime watching, scare devices, and fencing used the most. A household’s conflict history (>20 years for livestock loss, 10–20 years for crop loss), proximity to reserves, and crops grown or livestock owned were associated with higher mitigation use. There were differences across reserves, with households in Rajasthan least likely to use mitigation. Crop protection (88%) was more likely than livestock protection (32%). Investments in conflict mitigation should consider the history, location, species, socioeconomic variations among households, and differences in regional policies.

In search of common ground: Political ecology and conservation in the development age

Article

Jun 2017
GEOFORUM

In this essay, we respond to Menon and Karthik’s recent comments on our earlier critical review, which appeared in this journal. We clarify some of our original arguments and also draw out practical implications of the conceptual interventions made earlier. Specifically, we draw attention to the common ground shared by political ecology and the social formation of conservation by pointing to why conservation becomes necessary in the first place. We thus urge for a refocusing of political ecological attention from limited and limiting critiques of conservation to the root cause of socio-ecological marginalization in today’s world: the pursuit of development at multiple scales.

Coercing conservation? the politics of state resource control

Article

Jan 1993

Nancy Lee Peluso

Beyond human exceptionalism: Political ecology and the non-human world

Article

Feb 2017
GEOFORUM

We argue there is nothing inherent to political ecology that exceptionalizes humans over non-humans, as argued by Srinivasan and Kasturirangan in Geoforum recently. Political ecology’s main aim is to critique the discourses and practices of development and conservation, be it in relation to humans or non-humans, by examining the workings of political economy and power. It is, in other words, an analytical approach – not an ideology. If indeed political ecology has been guilty of inadequate attention to the non-human world it is because of its anthropocentrism and not human exceptionalism. We argue that prioritizing the non-human world is a normative choice and that retrieving its voice, however sensitive political ecology might be to doing so, will always be done within the social and political worlds that shape the lives of the non-human world.

Toward vegetal political ecology: Kyrgyzstan's walnut–fruit forest and the politics of graftability

Article

Feb 2017
GEOFORUM

Jake Fleming

As part of their long-running project to get beyond the nature–culture dualism, political ecologists have increasingly explored the active contributions of nonhumans to environmental politics. Upon decentering humans, however, too often posthumanist political ecologies have recentered humans and animals, indexing the enlarged category of ''political actor " to narrowly shared traits like mobility or intentional-ity. Among other consequences, this tendency in political ecology's posthumanism leaves the political agency of plants largely neglected. Political ecology suffers from this neglect, but the field can benefit from an integration of the insights of vegetal politics, a literature that traces the consequences of plant capabilities in more-than-human geographies. In this article, I model this integration—a vegetal political ecology—by examining human–plant partnerships in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan's walnut–fruit forest, an ecosystem distinguished by the number of its trees that can be modified by horticultural techniques like grafting. I argue that the forest's ''graftability " incrementally undermines two different hierarchies, one typifying people–plant relationships and another that characterizes state-centered regimes of post-Soviet forest governance. Graftability thus allows Kyrgyzstani villagers and trees to act with more autonomy than they otherwise would. This antihierarchical effect is a small biological determinism conferred by the capacities of the graftable tree, and it has political consequences. Vegetal political ecology aims to similarly connect plant performances to their broader political effects; by doing so, it can help political ecologists escape the residual humanism that still characterizes their efforts at posthumanism and better illuminate the political possibilities of partnering with plants.

Political ecology, development, and human exceptionalism

Article

Oct 2016
GEOFORUM

The sub-discipline of Political Ecology devotes much critical attention to the complex and often pernicious socio-ecological impacts of mainstream development - developmentality - across the world. However, despite the ’ecology’ in its name, Political Ecology continues to be predominantly anthropocentric which, we contend, compromises its critique of developmentality’s excesses. Drawing on recent literatures in philosophy, political theory, and human geography, we argue that both the more-than-human and social impacts of developmentality are enabled by zoöpolitical logics of human exceptionalism which support anthropocentrism. We suggest that the adverse effects of development are co-constituted with the positive vision of human wellbeing which runs through developmentality. Thus, an effective critique of development will necessarily have to address the zoöpolitical logics that underpin anthropocentrism. Doing so will strengthen the rigour of political ecology’s engagement with developmentality and widen its attention to the diversity of life harmed by

The production of human-wildlife conflict: A political animal geography of encounter

Abstract

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