Displacement versus Co-existence in Human-Wildlife Conflict Zones: An Overview

Abstract

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’.