Integrated framework for stakeholder participation: Methods and tools for identifying and addressing human–wildlife conflicts

Abstract

As wild areas disappear and agricultural lands expand, understanding how people and wildlife can coexist becomes increasingly important. Human–wildlife conflicts (HWCs) are obstacles to coexistence and negatively affect both wildlife populations and the livelihood of people. To facilitate coexistence, a number of frameworks have been developed to both understand the drivers of conflict and then to find solutions that mitigate conflict. However, each framework has different foci and strengths in particular stages of analysis. Here, we propose an integrated framework that leverages the individual strengths of previously fairly isolated methodologies, allowing for holistic HWC analysis. The framework for participatory impact assessment (FoPIA) provides a toolset for developing wildlife scenarios, selecting assessment indicators and assessing the impact of different scenarios. The social‐ecological framework of ecosystem services and disservices (SEEDS) analyzes the ecosystem services trade‐offs related to scenarios, and the 3i stakeholder analysis approach, supports the identification of stakeholders and provides a mechanism to explore, in detail stakeholders' interests, relative influence, and how outcomes of research are likely to impact different stakeholders. We apply these approaches to eastern Germany, where the increase in several wildlife populations (i.e., wild boar, common crane, gray wolf, and European bison) has contributed to conflict with people. We demonstrate the complementarity of FoPIA, SEEDS, and 3i in identifying stakeholder needs and showing how wildlife dynamics may affect coexistence and create imbalanced ecosystem service and disservice distributions. The integrated framework introduced here provides guidelines for analyzing the multistage process of stakeholder participation and enables a comprehensive approach to the complex challenge of HWCs.

Transdisciplinary deficit in large carnivore conservation funding in Europe

“…Such conflicts are historical and prominent in many European countries, obstructing the development of genuine collaboration and ultimately, transdisciplinary approaches. Moreover, such sectoral conflicts can directly drive human-wildlife conflicts (König et al 2021).…”

Eurasian crane (Grus grus) as ecosystem engineer in grasslands ‒ conservation values, ecosystem services and disservices related to a large iconic bird species

“…Large bird species, such as majority of the 15 crane species of the world are involved in human-wildlife conflicts as they often forage in croplands, even though they mainly feed on crop residue (Austin et al 2018). König et al (2021) investigated the ecosystem services and disservices of four iconic animal species, one of them being the Eurasian crane (Grus grus ). They found that the negative effects associated with crane presence were the moderate decrease of yield on croplands and increased labour and prevention costs that act at short term and local scales, affecting mostly private farmers.…”

“…Since not the same stakeholders experience the negative and positive effects, the effective conservation of cranes should include the compensation of those stakeholders (i.e., farmers) who are affected by the negative effects. The growing population trends of the world's two most abundant cranes -the sandhill (Antigone canadensis ) and the Eurasian cranes -are associated with their ability to make use of the expansion of intensive agriculture by opportunistic foraging on croplands (Harris & Mirande 2013, König et al 2021. The growing abundance of these two crane species will probably further intensify the conflicts between cranes and farmers.…”

Does secondary data suffice? Protected area conflict analysis in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Nevertheless, in CC studies, societal indicators are widely used (e.g. Andonegi et al 2021;König et al 2021;St John et al 2021), and this is expected to increase due to the growing availability of relevant big data (Haslam 2020). However, the uni cation of indicator-driven results at a particular level of a certain scale is less commonly performed than, for instance, in the broader eld of land use con icts (Cieślak 2019;Cieślak and Biłozor 2021;Dong et al 2021).…”