By Tasos Hovardas, Katrina Marsden, and Valeria Salvatori.
This Plain Language summary is published in advance of the paper discussed; check back soon for a link to the full paper.
People celebrate the comeback of large carnivores in human-dominated landscapes of Europe as a rare case of wildlife conservation success, but it has also led to the intensification of conflicts related to damage large carnivores cause, concerns for human safety, and reported feelings of fear, frustration, and anger by certain groups of rural people living in proximity to carnivores.
Regional Platforms for Coexistence between People and Large Carnivores are participatory processes which facilitate stakeholder interaction for mitigating human-carnivore conflicts in Europe. Our study explored perceptions of farmers and other stakeholders (for example, local authorities, hunters, conservationists, and the tourist industry) on their participation in Regional Platforms initiated by the European Commission in 2018 (“new” platforms) and earlier analogous participatory processes in Sweden and Finland (“old” platforms). We employed a survey (questionnaire), which we administered to all participants in these processes in two rounds of questionnaire administration, with a time frame in-between of one full year of platform operation.
Compared to other stakeholder groups, farmers attended more meetings in both new and old platforms. We found that both farmers and other stakeholders believed that new platforms allowed space for negotiation between groups already in the first round of questionnaire administration. In the second round, all participants in Regional Platforms believed that collaboration between stakeholders prevailed.
These findings indicate that new platforms supported constructive stakeholder interaction. Farmers reported that they worked well with key stakeholders, and they were trusted as much or even more than other stakeholders. In the second round, farmers in new platforms focused their attention on damage prevention measures and on improving measures and tools available in Rural Development Programmes. Future research should explore in more detail how multi-actor settings like Regional Platforms may support collaborative governance.
Relational Thinking 