Human-wildlife conflict management: participation and co-ordination
Student name: Mr Tshotsho
Guide: Mr Soumendu Sarkar
Year of completion: 2014
Host Organisation: TERI University
Abstract: The poor wildlife conservation outcomes that followed years of command and
wildliferesourcemanagement strategies have forced policy making and researchers to consider
the role of community in wildlife resource use and conservation. The conventional work on
development of community and wildlife conservation considered communities as incapable
and hindrance to progressive social and economic change. There has been a wave of research
afterwards where researchers and policy makers champion the role of community in
promoting decentralization, local participation, and wildlife conservation. But the four
assumptions (the state is willing to pass ownership and management responsibilities to local
communities, communities are interested in conservation, local communities have knowledge
and capacity to manage wildlife resources and wildlife conservation and rural economic
development are compatible), that underlie community-based conservation turned problematic
despite its recent popularity. Despite the substantial work done in the framework of
community-based human-wildlife conflict management with respect to conservation of
wildlife and community protection, a theoretical study of human-wildlife conflict using the
political ecology and market-oriented incentives has not received much attention. We intend
to make an inroad to this end.The unsuccessful management of human-wildlife conflict should
enable wildlife managers to realize that a focus on managing only the wildlife side of the
conflict does not help and should focus more on the human behavior change. We suggest an
integrated approach, combining political ecology and institutional economics that is able to
address institutional developments and multiple interest groups within communities in the
context of wildlife conservation.We stress that effective institutionalization of communitybased
wildlife conservation depends on local communities to have access to funds for
implementing their rules and decisions. These funds should be locally created rather than
external contributions by the governments and non-governmental organisations.
