Frame Reflection Toward The Resolution Of Intractable Policy Controversies

Humans have lived alongside and interacted with wild animals throughout evolutionary history. Even though wild animals can damage property, or injure humans and domesticated animals, not all interactions between humans and wildlife are negative. Yet, research has tended to focus disproportionately on negative interactions leading to negative outcomes, labelling this human–wildlife conflict. Studies have identified several factors, ranging from gender, religion, socio-economics and literacy, which influence people's responses to wildlife. We used the ISI Web of Knowledge database to assess quantitatively how human–wildlife interactions are framed in the scientific literature and to understand the hypotheses that have been invoked to explain these. We found that the predominant focus of research was on human–wildlife conflict (71%), with little coverage of coexistence (2%) or neutral interactions (8%). We suggest that such a framing is problematic as it can lead to biases in conservation planning by failing to consider the nuances of people's relationships with wildlife and the opportunities that exist for conservation. We propose a typology of human responses to wildlife impacts, ranging from negative to positive, to help moderate the disproportionate focus on conflict. We suggest that standardizing terminology and considering interactions beyond those that are negative can lead to a more nuanced understanding of human–wildlife relations and help promote greater coexistence between people and wildlife. We also list the various influential factors that are reported to shape human–wildlife interactions and, to generate further hypotheses and research, classify them into 55 proximate (correlates) and five ultimate (mechanisms) factors.

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Beyond conflict: exploring the spectrum of human–wildlife interactions and their underlying mechanisms

For the last decade social scientists have been trying to explain to us ecologists that a large part of the conflict between large carnivores and humans is in fact a social conflict. This implies that the conflict is actually one between different groups of people (those for, and those against, large carnivore conservation) as much as between carnivores and people. In other words, even if we solve all the material conflicts associated for example with depredated livestock and compensate for other economic losses, we will still not have addressed the social conflict, which may in fact be the most serious of all. I must admit that I have never really understood this, at least until reading this book by Martin Nie. Now I am a convert! Nie walks us through the developments in North American wolf conservation that have occurred in the last 2-3 decades. He draws on a comparison between the reintroduction in Yellowstone and Idaho as well as the natural expansion of wolves in Minnesota and Wisconsin. His opening chapter manages to explain the basic premise that I had never understood before; that wolf conservation is motivated by a value-based desire from a segment of the human population. Science is therefore viewed not as the motivator or the justification, but simply as the tool. The second chapter introduces the idea that wolf conflicts often have very little to do with wolves! Instead the wolves often become symbols or surrogates for wider and more fundamental conflicts between different human interest groups, for example tensions between urban and rural areas. The third chapter expands on these themes by exploring how the historical, social and geographic contexts of place influence the manner in which conflicts develop. The fourth and last chapter introduces a range of tools for addressing these social conflicts. The proposed solutions involve increased use of stakeholders and wider public participation in an attempt to broaden the base of support for conservation and increase the legitimacy of any decisions that are made. Unfortunately, he is unable to offer any magic formula; each approach has its own set of pros and cons, and success is likely to be highly situation specific. His final set of conclusions quickly summarise the main points and then point us further, placing the wolf discussion into an even wider context of how we want our democracy to function in practice. This book is highly readable and will be a real eye opener for many ecologists who are often becoming increasingly frustrated with the need to constantly address the 'human dimension' in the application of their work to real world conservation situations. It provides a solid introduction into political

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Beyond wolves: the politics of wolf recovery and management

Human–wildlife conflict (HWC), due to competition for shared natural resources between people and wildlife, influences food security of people and the well-being of people and animals. HWC is a major concern in developing countries, affecting people of different socio-economic classes. We conducted a meta-analysis of the occurrence of published scientific reports on HWC globally and South Africa particularly, to identify vulnerable human communities and their farming practices in developing and developed countries, and vulnerable wildlife guilds. We accessed Institute for Scientific Information publications from 1994 to 2015. Local communities (people living contiguous with protected natural areas) and commercial farmers jointly experienced the highest HWC incidences compared to subsistence farmers, possibly due to reporting bias for commercial farmers. Rural people in Africa and Asia experienced conflict with a diversity of mammals, confirming our expectation that developing countries could potentially experience regular encounters with wildlife. South Africa had more HWC cases than developed countries (e.g., in Australia and North America), yet the dichotomy between first world and third world economies in South Africa provides a regional exemplar of global patterns in HWC. Globally, HWC involved mainly mammals and birds, with carnivores and primates as the most high-scale conflict species and thus were a severely persecuted group. Our foundational research provides the first global assessment of HWC and showed that people in developing countries are vulnerable to HWC, perhaps related to reduced protection of livestock and crops against a larger guild of problem mammals. We suggest that a wider range of literature, including governmental and non-governmental publications, be surveyed to contribute to further research in this area of study.

A Meta-Analysis of Human–Wildlife Conflict: South African and Global Perspectives

Range expansion by large carnivores in semi-agricultural landscapes represents a serious challenge for managing human-carnivore conflicts. By focusing on an area of recent re-colonization by wolves in central Italy, where livestock owners lost traditional husbandry practices to cope with wolves, we assessed an ex post and a subsequent insurance-based compensation program implemented from 1999 to 2013. We cross checked official depredation statistics and compensation records from various registries, complementing them with a questionnaire survey of sheep owners. Compared to ex post compensation (1999–2005), under the insurance program (2006–2013) compensation paid annually dropped on average by 81.1 %, mostly reflecting that only 4.6 (±0.7 SD) % of sheep owners stipulated the insurance annually. Officially, only 5.5 % of active sheep owners were annually afflicted by wolf depredation during the insurance scheme, but we estimated this proportion to be as high as 34.3 % accounting for the proportion of affected sheep owners who did not officially claim depredations. Coupled with substantial retaliatory killing (minimum of five wolves killed/year), this large amount of cryptic conflict is a symptom of distrust by livestock owners of past and current conflict mitigation policies, despite more than two decades of compensation. We conclude that compensation may fail to improve tolerance toward carnivores unless it is integrated into participatory processes and that lack of reliable data on depredations and damage mitigation strategies exacerbates the conflict. Being advocates of the evidence-based paradigm in management, scientists share a key responsibility in providing objective data concerning progress of conflict management.

Ex post and insurance-based compensation fail to increase tolerance for wolves in semi-agricultural landscapes of central Italy

Attempts to mitigate conflict between wolves and livestock breeding in the Mugello area of central Italy have so far proven to be costly, resource-intensive and fraught with tension. I applied frame analysis as a tool for investigating the roots of such tensions. The frame-analytical perspective highlighted that, while current policy focuses on improving technical approaches, conflict is also fuelled by a discrepancy in the frames of meaning that groups of stakeholders construct around the issue of wolf management. I outline two discordant frames: a dominant valuable wolf frame, currently underlying policy, and a political wolf frame that challenges existing management aims. Barriers to communication and potential points of mediation are identified. In addition, I outline a third, problematic wolf frame that may act as a potential aid in the process of bridging the two discordant frames, which is identified as a condition for successful wolf management.

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Chiara Vitali

Papers

A frame-analytical perspective on conflict between people and an expanding wolf Canis lupus population in central Italy