Seeing animals like a state? Divergent forester subjectivities and the managing of human-wildlife conflicts in South India

Abstract

How do foresters in India understand the foundational and proximate causes of negative interactions between humans and wildlife? In this article we identify five distinct epistemological orientations towards managing human-wildlife conflicts (HWC) and drivers of those conflicts among staff at differing levels of the Indian forest bureaucracy across three protected areas in the Western Ghats. Through an empirical analysis employing Q method, we analyze forester subjectivities in relation to how forests should be managed with HWC mitigation in mind. Our results suggest forester perspectives are informed by social class and rank, geography, and experience. Forester positionality and knowledge is also at times in conflict with hegemonic perspectives of forest departments and can lead to the development of tensions in how foresters think about human-wildlife relations and managing HWC. Our analysis brings together concepts of multiple environmentalities with Gramscian ideas of the incoherent individual to theorize the varying subjectivities of individual state actors in understanding, managing, and co-producing forms of HWC. In doing so, this article contributes to contemporary debates about the theorizing of subject-making in political ecology and geography through an empirical case from one of the most important megafaunal conservation landscapes in Asia.