Co-creating coexistence: Advancing policies, practices, and stakeholder engagement for integrating wildlife and livestock into sustainable multi-functional landscapes in Europe

The recovery of wildlife populations (large carnivores and large herbivores) has created many additional challenges for pastoralism, already under pressure from multiple socio-economic drivers. These challenges include damage (depredation), extra costs, and many social conflicts.

Some of the major obstacles to addressing these challenges are conflicts between stakeholders and the contested nature of relevant knowledge.

The CoCo project will address these obstacles by adopting a multi-disciplinary approaches with a strong social science representation and a Multi-Actor Approach with widespread stakeholder engagement that facilitates co-creation of knowledge with high legitimacy.

The process will cover (a) the relationship between livestock husbandry practices and damage from wildlife, (b) ways to integrate wildlife management and pastoral management, (c) perceptions and values that different stakeholders have about the pastoralism-wildlife interface, (d) experience with different governance structures, (e) the potential of new and emerging technologies in both wildlife and pastoral management and monitoring, and (f) a cost benefit analysis of different scenarios for pastoral and wildlife management.

The project will use methods as diverse as systematic reviews, field inspections, face-to-face interviews, focus groups, questionnaires and modelling.

The project’s ambition is to collect original quantitative data from at least 1000 pastoralists, 1000 hunters and 1000 landowners and qualitative data from 100’s of stakeholders deployed in a comparative way across 12 countries.

The insights stemming from the reviews, the analysis of new data, and the modelling will be integrated into a Roadmap for Coexistence that produces policy relevant recommendations for a better standardization, harmonization and integration of both pastoral and wildlife management systems. This will reduce conflicts and secure multi-functional landscapes for both pastoralists and wildlife.