Unruly Animals: multispecies politics and the governing of wildlife state space

Abstract

My dissertation asks, why is tolerance for living with large wildlife in decline in South India? In addressing this question, I approach conservation as a process of territorialization, a practice mirrored in the spatial representation of geographic knowledge in scientific research. I first present the results of two case studies investigating the social dimensions of human-wildlife relations in one of the most critical conservation landscapes in South Asia. Second, while local case study research remains the gold standard for investigating complex causal mechanisms in human-environment interactions, there is increasing interest across a diverse suite of social-environmental research for ?scaling-up? case study research for global-scale knowledge generation. My dissertation therefore also considers the possibilities and persistent difficulties in doing so through a meta-study approach. In reflecting on my own case study research, I also suggest ways in which individual case studies of the political ecology of conservation can direct future research questions on human-wildlife relations within other geographic contexts. The first case study of my dissertation considers the role of conservation as ideology in the functioning of the state in violent environments. I reflect on a series of events in which a state forest department in South India attempted to recast violent conflicts between themselves and local communities over access to natural resources and a protected area as a debate over human-wildlife conflicts. I show how Louis Althusser?s theory of the ideological state apparatuses helps articulate the functioning of conservation as ideology within the state apparatus. Building on my engagement with conservation as ideology, my next case study analyzes conservation discourses of tolerance by communities to living with large carnivores alongside Bandipur National Park in India. The results show that declining tolerances of farmers experiencing damage and destruction of cattle by carnivores represents the cumulative impacts of a transformation of regional economy of South India, the local livestock economy, and more aggressive protected area management strategies. I discuss the implications of these findings for other locations in the global tropics where livestock rearing practices may conflict with protected area management goals. While Chapters 2 and 3 present individual case studies of the politics of human-wildlife relations in South India, Chapter 4 presents a meta-study of case studies to demonstrate the persistent geographic challenges researchers face in scaling up local and regional-scale case studies, such as those presented here, in global synthesis research. Here I assess the degree to which the quality of geographic description in 437 published land change case studies limits their effective reuse in spatially explicit global and regional syntheses. The quality of case geography reporting showed no statistically significant improvement over the past 50 years. And yet, by following a few simple and readily implemented guidelines, case geographic context reporting could be radically improved, enabling more effective case-study reuse in regional to global synthesis research, thereby yielding substantial benefits to both case study and synthesis researchers.