Written by Ashraf Shaikh
Edited by Aditi Subba and David Hecht
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In conservation, we often ask whether a community is willing to coexist with wildlife.
The question seems straightforward. But while interviewing people in villages around Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in India about what it means to share space with tigers amid increasing attacks and the risk of fatal encounters, I began to wonder whether “the community” was the right unit through which to understand coexistence at all.
At the beginning of the study, “community” was largely a practical term: people living in the same villages and sharing a landscape where tigers were present. But that shorthand quickly became difficult to sustain. A village may share a geographic boundary without constituting a socially homogeneous group. Its residents may have different livelihoods, exposure to wildlife, relationships with conservation authorities, and abilities to respond when risks change (Agrawal & Gibson, 1999).
Our study compared households that had experienced tiger attacks with neighbouring households that had not. The comparison showed how much can disappear when different experiences are folded into a single idea of “community attitudes”. The more I listened, the more I questioned whether coexistence could be understood simply through how a “community” felt about wildlife.
What “community” hides
People in these villages were not uniformly opposed to tigers. Many valued their ecological importance and accepted that tigers had a place in the landscape. But they experienced that presence differently.
For some households, a tiger sighting was an unsettling encounter. For others, repeated encounters had changed everyday life: when they entered their fields, how they travelled, which tasks they continued or discontinued, and how safe they felt moving around.
One interview that stayed with me was with a young man from a traditional fishing community. He told me that people had increasingly stopped fishing in a nearby lake after tigers were consistently seen there. He had started leaving before sunrise to look for wage work elsewhere.
Nothing about this sounded like a formal decision to abandon a livelihood. There was no meeting where the community decided that fishing was no longer possible. Instead, uncertainty and, in some circumstances, fear were becoming a governing force in daily life.
We often describe such changes as “livelihood disruption”(Barua et al., 2013). Sitting across from someone who had to find another way to earn a living because an everyday activity no longer felt safe made the phrase much less abstract.
Yet these experiences are often brought together under another broad term: “attitudes” towards wildlife. In human-wildlife conflict research, attitudes are commonly used to understand how people feel about or respond to wildlife, and to compare patterns of acceptance, tolerance, fear or opposition across groups (Dressel et al., 2015; Kansky & Knight, 2014). These measures can tell us something important. But when a village-level attitude is treated as an indication of how well people and wildlife are coexisting, different risks, costs and constraints within the same landscape can disappear.
It made me wonder how often we ask a village about its “attitude” towards wildlife without asking who within that village is actually living with the risks and consequences of sharing space with it.
When “attitudes” stand in for coexistence
People also had their own explanations for why encounters with tigers were increasing. They spoke about rising tiger numbers, translocations, tourism, prey availability and changes in tiger behaviour. Some of these explanations may be difficult to establish from ecological evidence alone. But whether or not they were ecologically correct, they mattered because they shaped how people understood danger, whom they trusted and what they believed management should do.
This became important to how I understood coexistence. People’s views reflected both the risks and values they associated with tigers. They feared tigers because of attacks, but also understood them through Waghoba (a local big cat deity), as guardians of the forest and important predators that kept wild boar and other herbivores in check. At the same time, they believed there was a limit to how many tigers a forest could support. This was not simply acceptance or rejection, but a way of negotiating the risks of living alongside an animal they valued.
This is where qualitative research can contribute something beyond another measure of “community attitudes”. It can reveal experiences that disappear when responses are aggregated into a village-level score or a measure of tolerance, while also asking whose knowledge is considered legitimate and whose experiences become visible in a supposedly shared landscape (Pooley et al., 2021).
What coexistence looks like
The idea of coexistence has helped conservation move beyond conventional approaches that sought to separate people and wildlife completely (Carter & Linnell, 2016). But I have come to think of coexistence as more than the continued presence of people and wildlife in the same landscape. It involves how that sharing of space is experienced, negotiated and sustained: whose risks are considered tolerable, who adapts, whose knowledge counts, and who has the ability to influence the terms of sharing that landscape (Pooley, 2021).
In Tadoba, people could value tigers, fear them, resent the Forest Department, ask for particular animals to be removed, and still speak about their ecological importance. These positions were not necessarily contradictory. To me, they reflected different ways of experiencing coexistence in a landscape where wildlife recovery and human vulnerability exist alongside one another.
For those of us working in conservation, this means asking more than whether a village “accepts” wildlife. Who encounters the risk most often? Which livelihoods are being altered? Who has alternatives when a livelihood becomes unsafe, and who does not? And who gets to decide what level of risk is acceptable?
These questions require us to look beyond the village as a proxy for “the community” and beyond “community attitudes” as a proxy for coexistence. A village may appear tolerant of tigers when its residents are treated as a single group, while particular households or livelihoods may be bearing much greater risks than others. A community-level measure of tolerance can therefore tell us little about who is actually living with those risks.
For me, this is why “community” needs to be treated as a question rather than an assumption in coexistence research. Before asking whether a community accepts wildlife, we should ask who is experiencing the risks, whose livelihoods are changing, who has the capacity to adapt, and who has a say in deciding what coexistence should look like.
Perhaps the more useful question, then, is not whether a community accepts wildlife, but who within that community is actually living with the risks and costs of coexistence and whose experience is being represented when we call it “community coexistence.”
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More about the author:
Ashraf Shaikh is a wildlife biologist and PhD researcher at the Wildlife Institute of India. His work focuses on human-wildlife interactions, particularly on how people experience and negotiate living alongside large carnivores.
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Further reading
Agrawal, A., & Gibson, C. C. (1999). Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role of Community in Natural Resource Conservation. World Development, 27(4), 629–649. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(98)00161-2
Barua, M., Bhagwat, S. A., & Jadhav, S. (2013). The hidden dimensions of human–wildlife conflict: Health impacts, opportunity and transaction costs. Biological Conservation, 157, 309–316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2012.07.014
Carter, N. H., & Linnell, J. D. C. (2016). Co-Adaptation Is Key to Coexisting with Large Carnivores. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 31(8), 575–578. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2016.05.006
Dressel, S., Sandström, C., & Ericsson, G. (2015). A meta-analysis of studies on attitudes toward bears and wolves across Europe 1976–2012. Conservation Biology, 29(2), 565–574. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12420
Kansky, R., & Knight, A. T. (2014). Key factors driving attitudes towards large mammals in conflict with humans. Biological Conservation, 179, 93–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2014.09.008
Pooley, S. (2021). Coexistence for Whom? Frontiers in Conservation Science, 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcosc.2021.726991
Pooley, S., Bhatia, S., & Vasava, A. (2021). Rethinking the study of human–wildlife coexistence. Conservation Biology, 35(3), 784–793. https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13653
