Inlaks – RSF Small Grantee 2020: Sayan Banerjee — Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Blog

Sayan Banerjee is a 2020 Inlaks – RSF Small Grantee. His grant was used towards understanding elephants – human interaction patterns in a human – wildlife conflict landscape in north-eastern India. It provided his project with an on-ground understanding of how relations between humans and wild elephants are slowly being established in a conflict-ridden landscape as well as potentially allowed him to develop strategies that would ensure more convivial relationships between humans and elephants in the future.

Sayan is currently a PhD Scholar at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India.

Various Dimensions of Human- Wildlife Conflict

*Human-elephant conflict at a forest-agriculture-plantation interface in Assam (Source: Ranjit Tanti)*

It has been widely acknowledged for a long time that the world is facing the dual challenge of climate and biodiversity crisis. Due to overconsumption and ecologically unsound and unplanned developmental activities, habitats which once were refuge of myriad of wild lives are now getting lost, fragmented or degraded. This has resulted into an increase in the overlap of human and non-human spaces and resources. The pattern and impacts from this overlap, which is often termed as human-wildlife conflict (HWC) have been widely studied across continents. Such overlaps have been found to be causing various problems for both wildlife and people: deaths, injuries, loss of critical resources such as food and home and mental trauma.

Even though it seems like a biological problem, a greater understanding of this issue shows that humans and wildlife who share spaces closely are not consciously in conflict with each other, but are forced towards such a living due to situations created by external powerful forces. In India, for example, large scale land use changes through mining, dam building, infrastructure and cash crop expansion among other causes have caused severe habitat loss and a resulting increase in HWC across regions. Presently, afforestation and renewable energy expansion at open natural ecosystems (ONEs) is also threatening fragile habitats and wildlife.

*An adult elephant who died due to suspected poisoning*

People, for whom HWC is an everyday affair majorly belong to the poor and socially backward groups. Loss of crops or houses or livestocks due to wildlife, such as elephants, tigers, leopards, primates and various ungulates often push them further into poverty. Apart from direct financial losses, it has been found that such wildlife related damages also produces hidden impacts, such as increased expenditure and workload, decreased physical and social mobility, loss of sleep and social capital and increase in mental trauma, fear and anxiety. Often, these hidden impacts remain unacknowledged and uncompensated and are found to be asymmetrically impacting women and children more.

For wildlife, the impacts could also be devastating. Greater movement or dependence on human-use areas could mean more stressful encounters with humans. These encounters could directly result into deaths, injuries or increased stress for individuals and groups and slowly, these effects could translate into decrease in in fitness for the overall population. Due to interdependence in the food web, negative effects on more conflict-prone species such as large carnivores and herbivores could jeopardise existence of other meso- or lesser level species.

Engagement from social scientific disciplines into the issue of this conflict showed that HWC is often a misnomer, since governance or addressal of HWC becomes a case for human-human conflict: a conflict between humans about wildlife. Thus, from completion over resources, HWC extends towards the human dimensions: values, judgements, attitude and perceptions. Most HWC research and conflict mitigation practice study ecological factors of conflict, but recommend human-oriented actions, such as behaviour or livelihood modifications. However, we need to remember that conflict is not only a technical challenge but also a social problem. Thus, conflict mitigation actions often become misdirected and may end in a lose-lose situation. The stakeholders may become unwilling to engage due to unrealistic conservations goals or socio-political unacceptability of financial incentives or coercion through legislation.

*Watching elephants as leisurely activity*

Here, to engage with the human dimensions of conflict mitigation, several questions need to be answered first. How do different human groups perceive HWC situations and mitigations? How do different humans behave when wildlife intrude into their space? How attitudes, behaviour and perceptions about different wildlife form in the first place? How do these human perspectives vary over time and space? Are the impacts from wildlife related damages and conflict mitigation actions distributed equally over the whole community? Are we taking local ecological knowledge about the wildlife seriously?

It has been proposed that examining people’s perception on the conflict and scientific understanding of wildlife damage are complimentary and critical to management of conflict. Catastrophic large-scale events, rather than persistent small-scale events develop individual perceptions of conflict. Species-specific responses from people also matter. Even though birds, monkeys and wild boars raid crops on regular basis and cause severe damage consistently for longer duration, farmers perceive greatest threat from elephants which in a single night can cause extensive damage to crops and to human life. The collective as well as individual tolerance about the ‘problem’ species are shaped up through the communication and memories about the facts and fictions of the conflict incidences over time.

India is currently facing tremendous levels of human-wildlife conflict incidences in almost all the states. While primates, wild boars and ungulates cause most damages, perception of conflict gets heightened for large-bodied species such as elephants, tigers, lions and snow leopards. These animals are also increasingly getting killed due to anthropogenic causes, such as electrocution, snaring, poisoning, electrocution and road-hits by vehicles. The threat of zoonotic spill overs is looming large due to increase in overlap of spaces. However, our conflict mitigation techniques have been limited to band-aiding the symptoms of the conflict, such as erecting various kinds of fences, driving out wildlife, afforesting small areas etc. These techniques often do not take human dimensions of the conflict into consideration. For example, erecting a solar fence does not necessarily reduce the perception of conflict with elephants or increase better communication and trust among various stakeholders. Habitats, once lost are almost impossible to restore without long term political, financial and social commitment. Conservation interventions often lose meaning when they fail to engage with political processes as large scale land use changes and therefore, resulting HWC cause due to political interests. Conservation needs to go beyond the narrow focus of species preservation towards working with this politics and take people who share spaces with wildlife as equal partners in this endeavour.