By Sayan Banerjee, Doctoral Scholar, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India
One of the key tenets of contemporary global wildlife conservation research and practice is understanding and managing human-wildlife interactions, reducing damages (or conflict) to both, and enhancing coexistence (Madden, 2004; Nyhus, 2016). Understanding these interactions is operationalized through various surveys by conservation organizations, academia, or government agencies. These surveys often include the estimation of damage (of properties and life), effects of environmental variables (land use change, resource availability, and requirement, wildlife behavior, etc.), and social variables (knowledge-attitude-behavior of people towards wildlife, demography, livelihood, etc.). These surveys have provided the key impetus to policymaking on how to manage human-wildlife interactions. While doing so, they bound people and wildlife into a certain space and time. These surveys often are not able to capture how historical social processes or developmental practices have created the human-wildlife interactions of present times and how those interactions can have wide variety of effects on both people and wildlife. Such nuances could only be captured through long-term engagement and observation of socio-ecological processes; in other words, instead of surveys, ethnographic methods become more suited to understanding the true nature of human-wildlife interactions.
Ethnographies, globally, have produced important findings for human-wildlife interactions. Among various such findings, long-term observations showed that (i) negative interactions between people and wildlife create several kinds of hidden impacts on people which remain uncompensated and unacknowledged (Ogra, 2008; Barua et al., 2013; Jadhav & Barua, 2012; Khumalo & Yung, 2015); (ii) the impacts affect people unequally in terms of their social positions of class, gender, caste, ethnicity, etc. (Doubleday, 2020; Banerjee & Sharma, 2022; Braczkowski et al., 2023); (iii) there are emotional coping strategies that go beyond livelihood-related adaptations (Gogoi, 2018); (iv) the present-day interactions emerge through deep historical and social events, including colonialism (Bhatia et al., 2020; Barua, 2014) and (v) place-based knowledge production create coexistence practices (Keil, 2020; Banerjee & Sinha, 2023; Kshettry et al, 2021; Dhee et al., 2019). These are important insights for wildlife conservation policy and practice in general and management of human-wildlife interaction. However, evidence is scarce on whether such important insights are considered while designing human-wildlife interaction management interventions by conservation practitioners and if it is being considered, then to what effect.
Ethnography has been a key tool to understand deeply how society as well as individuals function and how different actors interact to create social progress or development. Conservation, being treated as kind of ecology-centric development should not shy away from integrating ethnography in conservation research and practice. However, ethnographers or long-term observation-based social research hardly find a place in conservation projects and organizations. The application of social science in conservation is rapidly increasing but is again skewed towards quantitative paradigms. Few reasons can be considered for this no or slow uptake of ethnography in conservation frameworks. First, conservation today works as crisis-centric ‘projects,’ i.e., as a time-bound, funder-driven, rapid outcome-oriented endeavor where quick results (mostly in measurable terms) are envisaged within time and money constraints (Soulé, 1985; Larsen & Brockington, 2018). In this regard, a slow-burn, long-term ethnographic work seems to be a misfit due to its mismatch with the time and scale of the rapid conservation ‘projects.’ Second, quantitative social science often employs a ‘rational human actor’ model (Peterson & Isenhour, 2014) derived from behavioral economics to understand people’s attitudes and behavior towards wildlife. On the other hand, ethnography considers people’s behavior socio-culturally, politically, and ecologically embedded. Behavior change efforts targeted towards local communities to make them more ecologically sensitive are operationalized in an apolitical fashion, i.e. the situatedness of certain behaviours is taken as dependent on individual agency and not socio-political structures. By doing so, these interventions may have short-term effects, but they might not have the desired effects at scale due to their disconnection from structural barriers. Third, ethnography requires specific formal and experiential training, and thus, ethnographers are best suited to do this work. In the absence or low participation of ethnographers in formal conservation programs often force biologists or quantitative social scientists to employ ethnographic techniques, of which they do not have formal training. This is not only injustice to the ethnographic discipline, but also could inform the conservation program insufficiently.
Therefore, it is best suited for conservation funders, organizations, and government functionaries to understand that building collaboration with ethnographers, acknowledging and integrating ethnography as a useful and applicable subject, and molding funds to suit long-term observation-oriented works within conservation organizations will enhance our understanding on how to manage human-wildlife conservation better. This will also make wildlife conservation practice more politically situated, which is the need of the hour. Conservation crisis is a political crisis, and to tackle it, political solutions need to be formulated, along with technological modifications. Ethnography with its socio-political commitment and deep observation/learning techniques can be a useful ally in this endeavor.
References
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