Tigers as kin: Reconceptualising wildlife conservation and development in indigenous/local contexts

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Aims: In order to understand the position of indigenous peoples in the global ecological crisis, this project asks, 'how do local and indigenous societies maintain multispecies relations and biocultural conservation amidst externally driven change?'Importance: In the past 50 years, an increasing proportion of indigenous lands and cultures have come under pressure from the homogenising forces of market-based capitalism and one-size-fits-all conservation and development. Over the same period, 60% of all wildlife populations have been lost. This is not a coincidence. Although indigenous peoples represent <5% of the global population, indigenously managed land still constitutes about 40% of all ecologically intact landscapes across the Earth. In the era of Anthropocene, we need new frameworks and tools to understand how these diverse local/indigenous worlds, where nature and culture intertwine, will maintain biocultural conservation in the face of rapid socio-ecological change.Rationale: Conservation traces its history to West-centric ideologies that see nature as distinct and separate from humanity. It relies on natural science approaches that allow certain areas to be labelled 'natural', and thus worthy of conservation, while the remaining, where 'culture' lives, can then be 'developed'. Across numerous local/indigenous societies, where conservation operates, nature and culture are not seen as essentially separate. Enforcing externally conceived categories on diverse local human-nature relations had led to conflicts and failures that have continually undermined many present-day conservation programs. This widely relevant work proposes to re-conceptualise conservation research and practice as an interdisciplinary ethical collaboration. Moving beyond critiques, it pushes the current conservation paradigm in a new direction and shows how to meaningfully integrate natural and social sciences, indigenous and western knowledges, and science and ethics.Research context: This research is based in three ethnic homelands in the Northeast Indian border state of Arunachal Pradesh. There are plans to build nearly 200 mega-dams, highways and monoculture plantations in this once remote multi-ethnic region. Here, an entirely new tiger population was recently identified thriving outside conventional conservation mechanisms. This research, set within the context of the entry of global conservation NGOs, governments and developers, uses the case of the endangered tiger to explore larger questions around the role of local people in global conservation and development. Original multidisciplinary fieldwork will be conducted across these ethnic homelands in the region operating under comparable geopolitical conditions. In each, ecological tools (camera traps, remote sensing) and quantitative survey methods (questionnaires) to study wildlife will be integrated within multi-perspectivist ethnographic approaches to understand the changing nature of human-wildlife relations. Working from the ground up and with local people, this project will understand human-wildlife relations as they exist, on their own terms, destabilising earlier dichotomies. Data across the sites will be combined to understand what allows customary arrangements that support multispecies coexistence to adapt, resist or collapse under external pressures. In addition, this research will also investigate how these pressures (that emerge from, amongst others, free-market economy, policy implementation and climate change), act upon local practices.Impact: The project will produce 8 academic articles co-authored with local collaborators, a research framework published as a booklet, a cross-departmental interdisciplinary graduate course, 3 non-academic books in local languages (one from each site) on cultural stories of human-wildlife relations, regular articles in popular media, and white papers/policy briefs for UK government/institutions' on environmental policy at home and abroad.