A practical guide to understanding the context of human-wildlife coexistence

Fostering sustainable human-wildlife coexistence involves managing a more-than-human social process of complex interactions among people and wildlife. Developing effective coexistence strategies requires a thorough understanding of contextual intricacies inherent in these challenges. This paper goes beyond acknowledging the context-specific nature of coexistence challenges to emphasize that context itself is partly made by human thoughts and actions. Conservationists can consciously adopt an attention frame that enables them to navigate contexts in a manageable way, avoiding the dual pitfalls of oversimplification and overcomplication. Using the policy sciences approach, we introduce a social process framework designed to facilitate the analysis of complex contexts in coexistence challenges. It addresses both content (what should be included in the context) and procedure (how to analyze the context). At its core, this framework provides a functional understanding of five interactive elements: people seeking values through institutions using resources affecting wildlife. To “map” context is to comprehend how participants, consciously or unconsciously guided by their perspectives, engage in specific situations, employing their base values through various strategies to pursue desired outcomes from decision-making. Decision outcomes, in turn, have long-term effects on wildlife, resources, people, values, and institutions. We expound upon these categories and provide a set of guiding questions to facilitate empirical investigations into specific coexistence challenges in a problem-oriented, reflexive manner. This framework is a valuable tool to gain practical insights into coexistence challenges through conscious and systematic attention to key contextual variables, thereby contributing to enhancing the effectiveness of coexistence efforts.