Beyond Conflict: Power, Voice, and Coexistence

Human–wildlife conflict is most often described through visible events: crops destroyed, livestock killed, people injured or killed, and animals injured/killed/captured or relocated. These incidents are serious and demand urgent response. However, they do not explain why conflict escalates so sharply in some landscapes while tolerance persists in others. To understand this, it is necessary to look beyond animals and damage, and examine how a certain cultural ethos, power, voice, and social inequality shape the experience of conflict.

Across India’s conflict-prone landscapes, coexistence has not broken down because rural communities are unwilling to live with wildlife. Nor has it collapsed simply because animal populations have increased. It has weakened because the costs of coexistence are carried unevenly, and because those who bear the greatest burden are rarely involved in deciding how conflict should be addressed.

We consistently find that forest-dependent communities, Dalit farmers, landless households, livestock-grazers, small and marginal cultivators, women, and children suffer the most. For these groups, conflict is not an occasional shock but a continuous condition layered onto existing economic and social vulnerability. Their exposure to risk is higher, their coping options fewer, and their access to state support weaker.

Dalit and landless households often depend on small plots, wage labour, livestock, and access to common lands including forest fringes for minor forest produce and grazing. When mitigation measures such as fences, trenches, or restricted zones are introduced without consultation, it is frequently these households who lose grazing routes or access to resources. This forces people to walk longer distances, enter forests at unsafe hours or locations, or guard crops and animals through the night. What appears as a technical solution on paper often translates into greater danger for those with the least flexibility.

Women experience conflict in ways that are both direct and invisible. They are responsible for daily movement through risky spaces: collecting water and firewood, walking to fields, taking children to school, and managing households when men migrate for work. These activities often take place early in the morning or after dark, when animal movement is highest. As conflict increases, women are the first to restrict their movement. Fear becomes routine. Health care is delayed, schooling is disrupted, and income opportunities shrink. When injury or death occurs, women absorb additional responsibilities, often without land titles, savings, or institutional backing.

Children are also deeply affected. In one account  a school-going girl was killed by an elephant while cycling through a coffee estate on her way to school. Her parents did not demand the removal or killing of elephants. Their question was simpler and more troubling: whether it was unreasonable to expect that a child should be able to travel safely between home and school while living outside a forest. This question goes to the heart of the conflict. It is not about hostility toward wildlife, but about the absence of basic assurance of safety.

Official systems rarely capture these realities. Policy frameworks and compensation records measure acres damaged, animals lost, or payments made (and in under-estimated ways). They do not measure fear, fatigue, lost sleep, children withdrawn from school, or the steady erosion of resilience in households living with constant uncertainty. For many families, even years without major crop loss involve heavy costs in time, labour, and stress simply to remain safe.

There also exists a deep gap between policy claims and lived experience. At a large public meeting in Mysuru, senior officials presented rapid response teams and revised compensation rates as evidence of effective action. During the meeting, a farmer received a call from his son, who was trying to drive elephants out of a field. Despite repeated calls, the rapid response team had not arrived. The farmer handed the phone to the official and asked him to explain where the team was. In that moment, the distance between planning and reality became impossible to ignore.

Such gaps undermine trust. Farmers are repeatedly told that systems exist, yet experience abandonment during emergencies. Over time, this disconnect fuels anger not only toward wildlife, but toward institutions that promise protection and fail to deliver it.

Compensation occupies a central place in this tension. During the same farmers meeting, one farmer stood up and carefully listed the compensation amounts paid for different losses: how much for an acre of crop destroyed, how much for injury, how much for permanent disability, and how much for a human death. His figures were precise, reflecting long experience with the system.

He then asked a simple question. If the state assigns a price to crops, limbs, and lives, what price does it assign to an elephant’s life? If an elephant dies during conflict, should farmers compensate the government in return? The room fell silent. After a pause, the farmer explained his point. He said his concern was not about harming elephants. It was about the fact that the system had reduced human as well as animal suffering to a set of low and inadequate payments. What he wanted was safety for his family and protection for his livelihood, as well as for the animals to be protected, not repeated compensation after irreversible loss.

This exchange captures a widespread grievance. Compensation is often presented as care, but in practice it frequently feels like devaluation. Payments arrive late, fall far below actual losses, and ignore the preventive costs farmers incur year after year. For poorer households, the process itself involves repeated travel, lost wages, and, in some cases, informal payments. Compensation may soften the blow, but it does not prevent harm, nor does it restore dignity.

A recurring question that arises is who gets to decide how conflict should be managed when wildlife lives in people’s backyards. Decisions are often shaped by distant experts, courts, conservation advocates, forest department officials and centralised bureaucracies. Those living with animals daily have limited influence. Farmers questioned whether people living far away, who had never shared food or space with elephants, should determine relocation, capture, or continued exposure to risk. One farmer stated that he had fed elephants through his crops for twenty years and was no longer able to bear that cost alone.

This points to a democratic deficit in conservation governance. Communities possess detailed knowledge of animal movement, seasonal risk, and workable coping strategies. Yet their role is usually confined to compliance rather than co-decision. Coexistence, under such conditions, becomes an obligation imposed from above rather than a shared arrangement shaped through negotiation.

Another issue that is highlighted is that conflict is not understood uniformly even within the same landscape. In one area, settler farmers viewed animals primarily as destroyers of livelihood. In the same area, an Adivasi community described it as “sharing food”, as part of living in a shared landscape, where sometimes people eat and sometimes animals do. Neither group was exaggerating. Their responses reflected different histories, relationships to land, and survival strategies. This shows that conflict is not only ecological but cultural, and that a single policy lens cannot accommodate such diversity.

Another key insight is that animals adapt quickly, while policy does not. Elephants, leopards, and other species learn from experience. Cubs raised in agricultural landscapes learn to survive there and often return even after relocation into forests. Removing animals without understanding their learned behaviour frequently fails. Current policy treats all conflict as the same, without distinguishing between animals displaced by habitat loss, animals spilling over from successful conservation areas, and animals permanently residing in human-dominated landscapes. This lack of differentiation leads to blunt responses that satisfy neither conservation goals nor human safety.

Underlying many of these failures is an attempt to govern ecological and cultural diversity through uniform solutions. One department, one set of rules, and one model of intervention are being expected to work across vastly different landscapes. Small, community-led models demonstrate what is possible, but they remain limited because institutions are reluctant to transfer real authority to local levels, preventing positive experiences from being replicated.

When people are excluded from decision-making, resentment grows. In some areas this resentment is channelled into demands for removal or retaliation against animals, often amplified by political actors. Yet what is clear is that many farmers are more nuanced than such narratives suggest. They seek safety, respect, and support, not the destruction of wildlife.

Human–wildlife conflict, therefore, is not only about animals and land. It is about who is taking decisions on whose behalf, whose safety is negotiable, whose labour is invisible, and whose suffering is normalised. Dalit farmers, landless households, women, and children occupy the most exposed positions in this system, yet their experiences are least reflected in policy design.

Protecting coexistence requires more than technology or compensation. It requires recognising inequality, restoring voice, providing equitable spaces in decision-making and sharing responsibility. Until those who bear the greatest costs are treated as central participants in decision-making, coexistence will remain fragile. The challenge is not to ask vulnerable communities to tolerate more loss, but to govern shared landscapes with fairness, dignity, and collective care.