Segmenting Wildlife Value Orientations to Mitigate Human–Wildlife Conflict for Ecotourism Development in Protected Areas

Wildlife presents both a threat and a resource to humans. Protected areas offer the best protection for conserving biodiversity and ecosystems worldwide. Despite more than half protected areas around the world being established on indigenous land natives are generally prohibited official access. However, protected areas are suffering from encroachment of surrounding population and almost half of all protected areas are heavily used for agriculture. Those in the tropics especially are experiencing serious and increasing degradation from poor management of development projects, agricultural encroachment, and illegal resource use. As a result, human-wildlife conflict is a significant and growing problem around the world. The literature reviewed for this paper has been notable for its polarised assessment of the human-wildlife conflict. On one side are the biological sciences, devoted to understanding the mechanisms of biodiversity loss and its consequences for conservation. On the other side are the social scientists, concerned with livelihood issues in and outside protected areas. Cernea and Schmidt-Soltau claim that these two groups have had an unequal influence on policy, with biological sciences having devoted a “broader, deeper and more systematic research effort than the social sciences” [1:3]. To avoid some of the bias towards biological sciences present in the literature, this paper will examine the underlying conditions required for co-existence. As such, I developed the ‘human-wildlife interaction model’.

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Community perception of the real impacts of human–wildlife conflict in Laikipia, Kenya: capturing the relative significance of high-frequency, low-severity events

Oryx ◽

10.1017/s0030605316001216 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 52 (3) ◽

pp. 497-507 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Alec G. Blair ◽

Thomas C. Meredith

Keyword(s):

High Resolution ◽

Protected Areas ◽

High Frequency ◽

Full Range ◽

Individual Species ◽

Community Perception ◽

Relative Significance ◽

Wildlife Conflict ◽

Trade Offs ◽

Human Wildlife Conflict

AbstractBiodiversity conservation outside protected areas requires cooperation from affected communities, hence the extensive discussions of trade-offs in conservation, and of a so-called new conservation that addresses human relations with nature more fully. Human–wildlife conflict is one aspect of those relations, and as land use intensifies around protected areas the need to understand and manage its effects will only increase. Research on human–wildlife conflict often focuses on individual species but given that protecting wildlife requires protecting habitat, assessments of human–wildlife conflict should include subsidiary impacts that are associated with ecosystem conditions. Using a case study from Laikipia, Kenya, where conservation outside protected areas is critical, we analysed human–wildlife conflict from a household perspective, exploring the full range of impacts experienced by community members on Makurian Group Ranch. We addressed questions about four themes: (1) the relationship between experienced and reported human–wildlife conflict; (2) the results of a high-resolution assessment of experienced human–wildlife conflict; (3) the relative impact of high-frequency, low-severity conflict vs high-severity, low-frequency conflict; and (4) the effect of experienced conflict on receptivity to the conservation narrative. Our results show that high-frequency, low-severity conflict, which is often absent from reports and discussion in the literature, is a significant factor in shaping a community's perception of the cost–benefit ratio of conservation. Local, ongoing, high-resolution monitoring of human–wildlife conflict may facilitate more realistic and effective incorporation of the experienced impacts of human–wildlife conflict in conservation planning and management. Such monitoring could help to define locally appropriate trade-offs in conservation and thereby improve conservation outcomes.

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