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MILJØFORSK-Miljøforskning for en grønn samfunnsomstilling

Transformative wildlife management to enhance biodiversity protection and ecosystem services provision in shared and protected landscapes

Alternative title: Transformativ viltforvaltning for å forbedre beskyttelsen av biologisk mangfold og økosystemtjenester i flerbruks og vernet landskaper

Awarded: NOK 4.1 mill.

The media across Europe routinely contain reports of controversy and conflicts between different segments of society about the way wildlife should be managed. Very often this concerns issues about when it may, or may not, be appropriate to kill wildlife. However, there are also many other controversial topics concerning issues like disease management, vehicle collisions, the use of supplementary feeding in winter, the management of protected areas etc. Different individuals, organisations and stakeholder groups often take very different positions on specific issues. Typically, such conflicts involve hunters, livestock producers, and environmentalists. One important question to be resolved concerns if different people, or groups of people, have similar positions on multiple related issues, or if they have very diverse views on different issues. In other words, it is a question of whether people cluster into discrete groups with internally consistent views on a range of related issues? Alternatively, it is important to know how much diversity of opinions exist within different stakeholder groups. The TRANSWILD project aims to map out the different positions that key stakeholders take on controversial wildlife management issues, as well as survey the general public’s position, in Norway, Germany, Spain, Italy and Bulgaria. This approach will allow us to explore how positions vary within and between groups, and across different social / cultural settings. In light of the rapid changes ongoing in the human relationship with nature in general, and wildlife in particular, it is essential to keep track of these changes. As a first step we reviewed the existing ways in which people’s attitudes and values toward nature have been classified by different authors. We identified considerable overlap between the different approaches, but there were also many gaps within some frameworks that were identified by other authors. One of the most comprehensive attempts to organize diverse positions has been made by the IPBES in a report on the values of nature. They organize people into four world views, living in nature, living from nature, living with nature, and living as nature. We have built on this broad classification theme and added some missing elements identified by other authors to create a new draft typology of how people relate to wildlife. One of the main refinements that we propose is a focus on the large groups of people that live a life disconnected from nature. We propose that this can come about through multiple pathways, including from an active separation from nature, an active disregard for nature, or by simple indifference. Our next step has been to identify a set of concrete wildlife and nature management issues that we hope will allow us to classify people within our emerging framework. We are currently testing these questions and ideas in interviews with rural residents and will use this experience to modify our survey design before administering it to larger groups online.

The recovery of wildlife populations in Europe is a remarkable wildlife conservation success and presents challenges for human–wildlife coexistence in shared cultural landscapes, leading to trade-offs such as illegal wildlife killing, crop and livestock damages, and ensuing social conflicts. Ensuring long-term conservation outcomes for wildlife species, requires an understanding of benefits and trade-offs from wildlife, the effectiveness of alternative policy and management coping strategies as well as the role of stakeholders and alternative governance modes. TransWILD addresses these research gaps with a transdisciplinary approach linking wildlife ecology and sustainability science as well as stakeholders in case study regions with different protection status across major terrestrial ecoregions in Europe. We will investigate challenges and dynamics of human-wildlife interactions, comparing the situation of how we live with complicated common species (i.e. wild boar, moose, wolf) and draw conclusions for the evolving management approach of formerly rare, but now recovering species. Three research clusters will be employed: (i) Wildlife ecology, (ii) Sustainability science, and (iii) Transdisciplinary integration of academic and stakeholder knowledge. The combined use of these methods is expected to significantly advance knowledge on effective and integrative wildlife biodiversity management in Europe including case-specific, as well as general, conditions that are either conducive or limiting for wildlife conservation in protected and shared landscapes across Europe, on the role of current and alternative wildlife policy and governance modes and management practices as well as on sustainability impacts.

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MILJØFORSK-Miljøforskning for en grønn samfunnsomstilling