Moving From Coexistence to Conflict: A Political Ecology Perspective On Human-Rhesus Macaque Conflict in Himachal Pradesh, India

Abstract

Human-wildlife conflicts are typically treated as emergent dilemmas related to wildlife management and anthropogenic encroachment into forest land. However, conflict events are rarely discrete, localized phenomena with direct cause-effect relationships, and a better understanding of how historic changes in social and cultural practices and politico-economic decisions impact human-nature relationships would lend greater insights into the development and unfolding of conflict events. We employ a political ecology framework to investigate the case of human-Rhesus macaque conflict in Himachal Pradesh, northern India, to show that human-rhesus macaque interactions originate in structural changes in the region’s socio-economic systems because of global and national economic policies that have shaped the ecological stability of the region. Our analysis highlights that human-wildlife conflict needs to be examined as a complex interplay of multiple competing factors ranging in scale from the global to the local. It is therefore imperative that any strategy to mitigate human-wildlife conflict must account for the socio-ecological-economic stability of the region wherein the interaction occurs rather than merely addressing the visible cause of the conflict event.