Nikita Tiwari and Arpit Totuka
Abstract
Wildlife conservation in human-dominated landscapes is dependent on effective policy and governance systems for coexistence, rather than just conflict mitigation. This paper investigates the importance of policy and governance in determining human-wildlife coexistence in India by means of combining legal frameworks, national policy tools, and secondary empirical data.Parliamentary records show that there were vast interstate differences in the number of human deaths, with Odisha (414), Jharkhand (316), West Bengal (273) and Assam (217) suffering the brunt of elephant attacks. Electrocution caused 251 (75% of the total reported) elephant deaths over 3 years, reflecting crucial gaps in inter-sectoral coordination. These results prove that the outcomes of coexistence are contingent on governance, determined by the institutional capacity, policy implementation and administrative coordination as opposed to ecological factors. Strengthening adaptive, participatory and evidence-based governance as a key to the advancement of sustainable human-wildlife coexistence in India and other biodiversity-rich human-dominated landscapes.