Stakeholder attitudes toward the incentives used to mitigate human-elephant conflict in southern Africa: A news media content analysis

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Abstract

African elephant populations are under substantial anthropogenic pressure, but these are not spatially homogenous. Elephant densities are high in parts of southern Africa, leading to conflict with human populations. Conservationists working to mitigate impacts of human-elephant conflict (HEC) will turn to mechanisms or incentives to achieve this, mostly financial (such as compensation, or income generation through tourism). Little is known about the attitudes of stakeholders' (such as farmers) toward financial incentives used to mitigate conflict. Here we carried out a content analysis of stakeholder evaluative expression, or valence, using reports from the southern African news media. We sourced 428 separate news articles over the past ten years, and quantitatively assessed stakeholder valence on the financial mechanisms used to mitigate human-elephant conflict. We found that stakeholder attitudes or valence differed across countries and that stakeholders were generally positive, even with regard to controversial mechanisms such as trophy hunting. Our work has some implication for conservation policy.

Introduction

African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) populations are in decline across much of the continent, as habitat loss and human-wildlife conflict are compounded by an unprecedented level of poaching (UNEP, CITES, IUCN, & TRAFFIC, 2013). For example, in 2011 alone ∼40 000 elephants were killed as part of the illicit ivory trade (Wittemyer et al., 2014), while elephant populations are decreasing across Africa by 8% per annum (Chase et al., 2016). This decline is not spatially homogeneous: central and west African elephant populations have decreased markedly but many southern African subpopulations remain stable or are increasing (Wittemyer et al., 2014).

The localised high densities of elephants in conservation areas in southern Africa, and the consequences for tree community structure (Fisher et al., 2014) are broadly part of what is often referred to as the "elephant problem" (van Aarde & Jackson, 2007). One critical aspect of the elephant problem is the dispersal of animals outside of conservation areas (van Aarde & Jackson, 2007). Historically some elephants dispersed widely across the southern Africa landscape, in response to seasonal shifts in forage and surface water availability (see in Davison, 1977). Indeed, in present-day Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, individual animals may disperse annually as far as 260 km away from the park (Tshipa et al., 2017). Elephants require the capacity to disperse following seasonal changes. Still, in the current anthropogenic landscape, the movement and foraging activities of dangerous megafauna will invariably lead to conflict with human populations. Further, some elephants reside outside of formally protected areas (Chase et al., 2016).

Conflict between wildlife and people occurs when "wildlife requirements encroach on those of human populations, with costs both to residents and wild animals…" (IUCN, 2005). Conflict between elephants and people, or human-elephant conflict (HEC) may take several forms, principally through crop depredation, livestock loss, infrastructure damage and human injury or fatality. HEC is a substantial problem in Africa; not only does it drive decline in elephant numbers through retributive killing, but it disrupts food supplies; imposes opportunity costs incurred through crop guarding; undermines livelihoods, and threatens human life (Shaffer, Khadka, Van den Hoek, & Naithani, 2019).

HEC can determine habitat use and movement by elephants, for example, key elephant habitat in Botswana may be only 30–50 km from human settlements (Roever, van Aarde, & Chase, 2013). Still, elephants will fail to use habitat where human densities are 15–20 people/km−2, or greater (Hoare & Du Toit, 1999). In Botswana, 80 % of elephant deaths occurred within 25 km of people (Roever et al., 2013). Large male elephants tend to be crop raiders, and some are repeat offenders, for example, in Amboseli, 12 % of raiders were habitual and accounted for 56 % of raids (Chiyo, Moss, Archie, Hollister-Smith, & Alberts, 2011). In a community adjacent to Meru National Park in Kenya, elephants raided over 140 farms over one year, and farmers lost crops valued at just over 140 000 USD (Sitienei, Jiwen, & Ngene, 2014).

The mitigation of HEC is obviously of much concern to conservationists and can be broken down into three categories: biological, physical, and governance-based (Hoare, 2015). Biological mitigation may include the removal (culling or translocation) of habitual crop-raiders and the use of deterrents, such as bees (Gordon, 2019; King, Lala, Nzumu, Mwambingu, & Douglas-Hamilton, 2017). Physical mitigation includes barrier fencing and olfactory repellents. Government-based mitigation includes direct compensation and community-based conservation measures. Typically, mitigation will use a combination of these, and community participation is key to success (Hoare, 2015).

Financial mechanisms and incentives may be used to mitigate HEC, principally through government-based approaches. Mechanisms may include direct compensation (Nyhus, Osofsky, Ferraro, Madden, & Fischer, 2005), and incentives may include income generation through photographic tourism and hunting (Taylor, 2009) or sales of meat and hides (Le Bel, Stansfield, La Grange, & Taylor, 2013). Some financial aspects of HEC mitigation are contested, such as hunting (Wanger, Traill, Cooney, Rhodes, & Tscharntke, 2017) and ivory sales (Harvey, 2016). The southern African media drive some of this debate (Macdonald, Jacobsen, Burnham, Johnson, & Loveridge, 2016), which is significant not only because they have the capacity to shape societal opinion (Rust, 2015), but also because they reflect societal views or state policy where news is partly state-owned. Some insight into societal views in southern Africa and possible government policy on the financial mitigation of HEC may thus be derived from the African media.

Where scientists lack the capacity to survey numerous communities, then content analysis of the news media provides a useful alternative (Houston, Bruskotter, & Fan, 2010). Published attitudes of various stakeholders by the news media can be quantified as valence, viz. positive, neutral or negative attitudes toward different aspects of the conflict (Rust, 2015). Although stakeholder views on elephant management in Botswana were the subject of a previous study (Adams, Chase, Attard, & Leggett, 2016), to date there has been no quantitative assessment, through content analysis of the news media, of stakeholder discourse, or attitudes toward the financial mechanisms and incentives used to mitigate HEC. Such an analysis of public discourse across southern African states could be highly informative, given the variation in elephant densities across these countries (Thouless et al., 2016), as well as their different forms of land ownership and approaches to wildlife management.

Considering these differences, we hypothesised that 1) stakeholder attitudes or valence on HEC mitigation would be dissimilar between countries in southern Africa, and 2) stakeholder valence would potentially vary across different financial mechanisms or incentives used to mitigate HEC.

Section snippets

Methods

We defined stakeholders as those people affected by HEC or involved in the mitigation of HEC, as well as those people who may benefit from elephant conservation. We could not survey stakeholders ourselves, and so we developed an approach based on content analysis of the news media (Houston et al., 2010). We first sourced all available opinions, or attitudes expressed by stakeholders (in the news media) and then coded their valence toward HEC mitigation. The attitudes of stakeholders may be

Stakeholders

In all four southern African countries, government representatives were the most referenced stakeholders, notably in Zimbabwe (Table 1). Academics were the second most referenced stakeholder in Botswana, while communal farmers were widely referenced in Zimbabwe. Conversely, Namibia and South Africa used conservation NGOs more often as sources of information after the government. Professional hunters and tourism operators were not widely cited as stakeholders, and farmers were relatively highly

Discussion

Our work provides useful insight into stakeholder attitudes toward the financial mechanisms and incentives used to mitigate HEC across southern Africa. The work is timely given the growing elephant numbers in many parts of southern Africa (Chase et al., 2016), and the "wicked problem" that this presents to wildlife management authorities (Owen-Smith, Slotow, Kerley, Van Aarde, & Page, 2006).

We obtained some interesting findings. First, African stakeholders are generally positive about contested

Disclosure statement

We did not receive any funding for this work. We abided by the Journal for Nature Conservation guidelines on ethical standards. No study animals or human subjects were surveyed or interviewed. There were no competing or conflicting interests.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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  • 1

    SvH, LWT and RPB all contributed to the study design. SvH collated, analysed and wrote the paper with some assistance from LWT and RPB.

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