The political economy of human-wildlife conflict and coexistence

Researchers have highlighted a conspicuous dearth of analysis focused on political-economic structures and processes in the rapidly expanding literature exploring human-wildlife conflict and coexistence. In this paper, we respond by highlighting the importance of attending to the influence of such dynamics in understanding and addressing both conflict and coexistence in human-wildlife interactions in particular locations and well as across levels and scales. We describe how analysis from the perspective of the capitalist political economy and the "uneven geographical development" (UGD) it produces can help to shed light on how different forms of such interaction arise in specific places and times. We illustrate this mode of analysis through comparative discussion of two contrasting case studies of human-wildlife interaction in Costa Rica and Bulgaria. We demonstrate how the particular positioning of our research sites within the overarching societies - as well as each society's positioning within an evolving capitalist world-system - encourages either conflict or coexistence between people and wildlife depending on this positioning. We conclude by calling for more researchers to also explore the overarching political-economic structures shaping human-wildlife interaction in their own contexts of study in order to more effectively address this important formative factor in patterns of conflict as well as coexistence.