Understanding Human-Elephant Conflict Through More-than-Human Political Ecology Framework in North Bengal, India

Abstract

This research explores Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) in North Bengal not simply as a challenge to conservation goals or rural development, but as an intricate socio-ecological crisis shaped by unequal power relations, shared histories of marginalization, and daily events of interspecies negotiations. The study’s core argument is that growing HEC events cannot be solely attributed to human actions. Instead, HEC is co-produced through a dynamic interplay between human actors, nonhuman actors (here, elephants), and inanimate materials such as haria (a traditional tribal brew) and electric fences. Therefore, the central objective is to understand how human, nonhuman, and inanimate materials interact to shape HEC in North Bengal. The project deploys a more-than-human political ecology framework that uses a mixed methods approach, which combines ethnographic findings with ecological data through camera traps and satellite telemetry. The combination of methods allows a nuanced understanding of how both humans and elephants perceive each other and navigate the shared landscape for better resources and survival. Elephants, through their increased state protection, emerge as political animals under the contemporary conservation regime, wherein they adapt to ‘weak’ retaliation by humans and modify local agricultural practices—behaviors reflecting interspecies cultural learning, adaptive intelligence, and political awareness. Haria emerges as ‘less illegal’ than timber felling and remains a key livelihood option among the Adivasis (an umbrella term for migrant indigenous tribes who primarily work in tea estates). However, as an actant, it acts as a double-edged catalyst, both attracting elephants and rendering intoxicated humans more vulnerable to HEC. Resultantly, Adivasis account for 61% of total human deaths and 54% of human injuries by elephants, even if they constitute merely 15.5% of the population. Electric fences remain the most preferred technical intervention to mitigate HEC. Regression analysis through the Difference-in-Difference technique shows that electric fences reduce the elephant induced costs locally by 32% but also create a spillover effect of increased cost in the neighboring unfenced (40%) and weak-fenced (37%) villages. Overall, this research calls for not only mitigating HEC but also transforming the conditions under which it prevails. This can be achieved by bringing together and recognizing the political lives of elephants, the cultural politics of haria, and the contested consequences of electric fences, instead of separating them through disciplinary and political boundaries.