Image courtesy of Colorado Parks and Wildlife.
By Mireille N. Gonzalez, Taylor N. Heid, Rebecca Niemiec.
On December 18, 2023, Colorado Parks and Wildlife began the first-of-its-kind wolf reintroduction, the result of a public vote cast in the 2020 election. This process has been wrought with stakeholder conflict, a controversy that is not unique to Colorado as wolves are a notoriously contentious topic across the American West. Increasingly, social science research illustrates that such human-wildlife conflicts are not only caused by impacts to people, such as livestock losses. In fact, conflict between people about wildlife and wildlife management exacerbates the contention. Value clashes and identity differences between stakeholders often fuel such conflict. Yet, little research in the conservation and natural resource field has given attention to identifying how to reduce these value and identity conflicts about wildlife. To address this, we interviewed stakeholders highly engaged in the issue of wolf reintroduction in Colorado and used theories from peace-building fields to gain insight into the drivers of the conflict to inform pathways for reducing it.
Research in these fields suggests that four types of perceptions fuel these value and identity conflicts. These include perceptions about: (1) the groups one is in conflict with; (2) one’s own social group; (3) the relationship between the groups in conflict; and (4) the nature of the conflict. We found that all interviewees discussed perceptions that can fuel conflict within each of these four areas. Interviewees who presented a more middle-ground perspective within the conflict engaged in the most perspective-taking, an activity that can help reduce conflict. Conversely, both those strongly in support of reintroduction and strongly opposed to reintroduction most commonly described negative perceptions about those individuals with whom they are in conflict and positive perceptions about their own social group. For example, when discussing others, both groups described each other as acting in unjust and unfair ways, as being incapable of or unwilling to change, and as misinformed. When describing positive perceptions of themselves, both those in support and those in opposition viewed their own goals as just and themselves as victims of outgroup members’ actions. Based on our findings, we suggest various stakeholder engagement processes to assist wildlife managers in reducing the conflict about wolf reintroduction in Colorado.
Relational Thinking 