As landscapes continue to become more fragmented, causing continuous and heightened problems relating to HWCs (Mir, Noor, Habib & Veeraswami, 2016), the need evolves for large-scale regional planning to mitigate and reduce this conflict. While avoidance is evidently the paramount choice, at times, reactive tactics are essential, especially after HWCs have transpired (Marecha, 2017). A combined method to the alleviation of conflict between people and wildlife (i.e. taking into account the local people’s needs, as well as those of wildlife) takes into perspectives the significance of comprehending conflicts from a human viewpoint, because their principles are possible to effect their attitudes and behaviour regarding to wildlife acceptance (Hill, 2000). Mitigation approaches try to reduce the degree of impact and to reduce the problem being dealt with (Marker & Boast, 2015). As discussed below, various ways exist of mitigating HWCs.
57 3.12.2.1 Problem animal control
In PAC, which is a lethal form of control, the focus should be lain on those individual
animals actually causing the problems (i.e. the culprits), and the group of animals whose home range includes the site where the problem is occurring should be targeted (Osborn, 2002). In realism, the problem wild animal is not usually identified, with any individual wild animal actually killed to please, and meet the request for action and retaliation by the wounded community, especially in the case of the loss of human life or agricultural produces (Matsa, 2014). In such circumstances, the action taken by the wildlife authority rangers in context might have public relations value, but, in all possibility, the perpetrator animal will survive and carry on to inflict destruction, because it remains anonymous (Metcalfe, 2005). In Tanzania, efforts to find ‘problem elephants’ in Kilimanjaro Heartland during the 1997 dry season, in a collaborative effort between AWF, the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and the Amboseli Elephant Research Project, attested to be pointless (Crooks, 2002; Osborn, 2002). The achievement of the scheme was not evaluated, and the elephants that were killed during the PAC interferences might, or might not, have been the perpetrators involved (Martin, 2005).
PAC is frequently executed by the national wildlife authority in control of any given area. The ‘problem animal’ can either be exterminated or taken for translocation (McGregor, 2003). The failure of PAC to alleviate conflict does not essentially mean that the method is completely ineffective. Normally, killing a problem animal is held to be the best way to demonstrate the other animals in the area to stay away, even though it is often not easy for wildlife rangers to get consent quickly to shoot an animal, which makes killing the culprit nearly impossible (Ogada, 2011). Benka (2012) and Dickman (2010a) further stress that the efficiency of numerous methods hinges on several elements, like the characteristics of the species and the area involved. PAC is, arguably, regularly problematic when threatened species are caught up. In such a case, translocation may be a desirable possible technique in terms of PAC (Messmer, 2000).
3.12.2.2 Compensation and benefit-sharing
Compensation structures are proposed to assist people who bear the costs of living with wildlife from becoming the conservation opponents (Nyphus & Tilson, 2004b). HWCs carry substantial economic costs for people, and recompense is a method that objects to lessen
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conflict through reimbursing those involved for their losses (Distefano, 2005). Compensation can lessen the weight of conflict between the local communities and the conservation agencies, thereby amassing the communities’ sustenance for, and sense of ownership of, conservation initiatives (Bowen-Jones, 2012). Justifiably, the method reinstates the faith of societies after loss has been sustained due to the destructions produced by wildlife. The method is typically restricted to particular classes of loss, such as livestock that is killed by elephants or predators (MET, 2003). The schemes are often funded by a conservation organisation, although government schemes also exist (MET, 2005). All are designed to prevent the affected communities from taking direct action themselves, which would otherwise usually have involved hunting down, and killing, the individual elephants, lions or other species involved (Morzillo et al., 2014).
Despite compensation schemes meeting the needs of host communities in financial recomposes, they do have their own problems (Musiani et al., 2003). They are not easy to administer, requiring, in some cases, dependable and moveable workforces on the ground to validate claims (MET, 2005), whereas, sometimes they are very expensive. The worst case situation exists in Zimbabwe and Uganda (Paris, 2006), where the national governments have a tendency to to abandon, and segregate, wildlife organisations in compensation schemes. Compensation deals only with the economic facet of a conflict that is equally a socio-political and an ecological challenge, with links to matters of land use, impartiality and empowerment (Nekaris et al., 2013). The system also does not consider the impact of such occurrences on reliant on children, who are devoid of education to the lack of school fees (Ocholla et al., 2013). Although compensation schemes provide reparation after the inflicted damage on the local communities by wild animals, a wider method involves providing physical benefits to land owners in acknowledgement of the role that they play, and the costs with which they have to contend, in hosting wildlife on their land (Mustafa, & Tayeh, 2011). For instance, a popular pilot programme has been operating for some years for the landowners adjacent to Nairobi National Park (Mzembi, 2016).
Generally, though, the method is costly and needs monies to be made accessible year after year (Kideghesho, 2006). The purpose in the Nairobi National Park experimental task was to increase adequate monies to be able to institute a donation that could then withstand the programme, but, to date, the required funds have not been secured (Kideghesho, 2006). The KWS has a programme of allocating the revenue produced from the national parks with the
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neighbouring communities, whose funds are delivered directly at community level, for such facilities as classrooms for schools and cattle dips (Reynolds & Braithwaite, 2001).
In benefits sharing, the services (facilities and amenities) are valued by the communities concerned, although community-level benefits do not recompense for discrete losses, like the predation of livestock, or crop destruction (Ogra, 2008). Whether such revenue-sharing programmes affect the attitudes of the affected communities towards coexistence with wildlife, is much debatable (Som et al., 2006). However, the appraisal tells that the problem is multidimensional, with some administration practices being futile, while others are monetarily unmaintainable, or too technically compound and costly for deprived countryside communities to assume (Taylor & Knight, 2003). However, HWCs can be minimised through the implementation of good administration practices and methods including low-cost know- hows (Ogada, 2011). The literature (Bowen-Jones, 2012) submits that financial compensation is futile in decreasing the number of conflicts, and in growing the level of tolerance among those affected by the aftermath of HWCs, with accomplishment often being due to the social circumstances involved, rather than to the mechanism per se. However, Ariya and Momanyi (2015) and Bauer and Kari (2001) reaffirm the efficiency of the mitigation subsequent from recompense and benefit-sharing, collected together with the suggested use of other complementary approaches.
3.12.2.3 Community-based natural resource management schemes (CBNRMSs)
Contemporary pragmatic academics (Keyser, 2009; Hall, 2010) have been extremely vocal on the subject of host community participation in tourism development, with an intent to grow the local economies. A CBNRMS has been established in the Caprivi region (Namibia), where the ecotourism and hunting allowances are possibly appreciated in terms of evolving an indigenous economy that is based on wildlife-related incomes (Collomb, 2009). The scheme involves an arrangement of returning aids to the remote communities, in order to motivate them towards the protection of wildlife outside the PAs, and to discourage illegal hunting (Chigwenya & Chifamba, 2010). Nsibimana (2010) highlight that, while the system is still at an initial phase, it is anticipated to have real possibilities in terms of alleviating conflict. Nonetheless, one should not ignore Dickman and Hazzah’s (2016) point of view: the effectiveness of the conflict management measures adopted differ from one place to another, due to the varying factors (i.e. species and geographical location) involved.
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In managing HWCs, a fundamental rational norm of conflict resolution is the idea of having a good understanding of the scope of the specific conflicts that one is trying to resolve (Dorresteijn et al., 2014). Without such an understanding, one may establish that, it is practically impossible to devise effective prevention, mitigation or resolution strategies. In the best case scenario, such untargeted actions might have little effect, but, in the worst case, clumsy or untargeted actions might essentially surge levels of conflicts (EC, 2013). To better comprehend the reason for many different remedial measures being developed around the world but have not been implemented globally, it is essential to underscore that, although the management approaches have similar goals, they are embedded in different environmental, societal, cultural, and economic realities, in the communities of different taxonomic groups (Mir et al., 2016). More usually, all of the above need viable financing, and they are most probable to be operative when they are tied to improving the preventative measures to minimise the number of HWCs, as well (often) as supplementing other financial and nonfinancial maintenance schemes (Bowen-Jones, 2012). The mitigation of such conflicts, and the proper quantification of their proximate and ultimate causes, has, arguably, become an increasingly important part of conservation policies (Mir et al., 2016). In formulating such policies, adopting an ethnoprimatological perspective is imperative. Such a standpoint permits for a conservation policy to be well-defined in relation to an indigenous cultural context, in terms of which traditions and religious aspects usually exist for the preservation, or to the harm, of wildlife (Lee, 2010; Nekaris et al., 2013). As much as the measures are used to halt HWCs, a variety of challenges can be encountered in the process (UN, 2013), as are discussed below.