The Myth of Human–Wildlife Conflict: Why Wildlife Is Not the Problem Reframing Wildlife Governance Through the Ethics of Coexistence

Conflict is one of the most powerful words in conservation. It shapes legislation, management plans, research priorities, funding decisions and public attitudes. Once an interaction is labelled a conflict, the search for a solution begins. Yet surprisingly little attention is paid to the more fundamental question: what, exactly, is in conflict? For decades, human–wildlife conflict has been a dominant paradigm through which conservationists, policymakers and wildlife managers understand difficult interactions between people and wild animals. The concept appears self-evident. Elephants damage crops. Predators kill livestock. Baboons enter homes. Crocodiles injure and sometimes kill people. These events can impose genuine economic, physical and emotional costs, and nothing in the argument that follows seeks to diminish them. What I question is something different: whether describing these interactions as human–wildlife conflict correctly identifies either their origins or the appropriate object of management. My central argument is that wildlife is seldom the underlying cause of what we call human–wildlife conflict. Conflict emerges from the ways human societies organise landscapes, distribute resources, establish property relations, construct legal categories and determine what constitutes acceptable animal behaviour. Wild animals respond to ecological opportunities and constraints. Humans decide when those responses become unacceptable. This distinction is important because the diagnosis determines the treatment. If wildlife is understood as the problem, wildlife becomes the object of intervention. We fence, deter, translocate, sterilise, contain and kill. If, however, many of these interactions arise from human decisions about land, infrastructure, waste, agriculture and protected-area boundaries, then our conventional approach has the problem backwards. We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at managing animals while remaining remarkably resistant to managing ourselves. This paper therefore asks whether conservation should move beyond the paradigm of conflict management towards something more demanding: governing for wildness. Such an approach would begin not by asking how wildlife must change to accommodate human society, but how human institutions must change if wild animals are to continue living as wild beings within increasingly shared landscapes.