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What’s your favorite thing to talk about? For me, it’s conflict. And I’m talking about great, destructive conflict. But the reason why may not be what you think. I don’t revel in destruction—but this kind of conflict is an opportunity for constructive change. For progress.
Conflict is also central to how my organization approaches conservation. We call this approach conservation conflict transformation.
Think about all the different ways that you can address conflict as existing on a spectrum. At one end you have a rights-based dispute. You might just take the person to court, file a lawsuit, settle the dispute, and you’re done. Moving along the spectrum, you might be negotiating for a new car. It doesn’t matter if you and the dealer get along. All that matters is that you get the car, they get their money, and you go home, never to see each other again. Moving further along the spectrum, we get to conflict resolution, for example, a divorce or an interest-based negotiation, where each person is wondering what they can get out of it, or what the alternatives might be if there’s no easy agreement.
We need to recognize that people—scientists included—make decisions based on emotions.
Finally, we’ve made it to the opposite end of the spectrum than we started from. Here, we have conflict transformation. It’s the most comprehensive way of engaging with really deep-rooted, seemingly intractable conflict.
We like to say it’s about going deep, going wide, and going long. Let’s break each of those pillars down:
Go deep: Going deep is about reconciling that deep-rooted, us-versus-them identity conflict that we see so much of in society.
Go wide: We see that in conservation and wildlife conflicts, these conflicts are really a microcosm of what’s going on in the wider society. So we can use that element of conservation or the conflict over wildlife as an entry point to start to rebuild the fabric of the society. Ultimately, if society can function, then people and nature can thrive.
Go long: It’s not enough for a third, neutral party to parachute in and try and get everybody together and make a decision. That’s not going to work. Ultimately, conservation, culture, and communities—they’re all in this for the long term. If they can’t thrive, if they can’t have stability and security for the long term, then nothing we do will last.
Conservation conflict transformation is really a relationship-focused mode of problem solving and action. We need to recognize that people—scientists included—make decisions based on emotions. If we have a relationship-focused process, then we can start to reconcile deep-rooted conflicts and solve problems more productively, with genuine trust and collaboration and equality.
There’s another way to think about the different layers of conflict we conservationists need to go through to reach a genuinely collaborative and lasting place of understanding. Say you have a dispute: the rats are eating the tortoise eggs, for example. If that were the only thing at stake in a political, cultural, and social system, then that would be easy. But often, there’s deeper roots to this conflict, a history of unresolved disputes.
If something happened last week, or last year or even 10 years ago, between the people making these decisions, and some people were left feeling bad, then that’s going to influence any attempt to solve the current dilemma. Beyond that, we can go deeper to the identity-based conflicts, the us versus them. We might think of these as the “isms” of the world; sexism, racism, ageism, anti-semitism. In the context of conservation, these conflicts can look like urban versus rural, liberal versus conservative, government versus citizen. These conflicts enable us to form prejudicial assumptions about the other group, impeding our ability to genuinely work together and solve each others’ problems.
What this should tell us is that focusing on the substance—the “what”—of the dispute is not going to cut it. Instead, we should focus on the “how”—how decisions are made—and the “who”—what relationships govern those decisions. We need to address all three factors—the what, the how, and the who—to have a truly strong resolution. Think of it like a three-legged stool. If one leg is weak, and you put pressure on the stool, then it is going to topple. We need to adapt our processes to the specific contexts that we are in, otherwise we won’t have that strong foundation to solve problems on.
To do that, we need to consider one of the most important elements of conflict, and that’s a concept called the hierarchy of needs.
A simple version of the theory identifies six buckets of needs, including identity, recognition, security, belonging, meaning and personal fulfillment, and freedom.
Identity can be described as how you see yourself in relation to the rest of the world. And when one’s identity is under threat, or isn’t being legitimized, then the instinct is to fight. The gut feeling is that if you are trying to annihilate them, then they will try to annihilate you. People need recognition, respect, and dignity of self-worth. They need security, which can mean physical or economic security, but it can also mean cultural, emotional, and social security as well. At the same time, we crave connection, that feeling of being accepted and loved.
So what has this got to do with conservation? Consider that all these human needs intersect with one another. What that means is that, if we are part of a multi-party project, and one side is pulling back, what might really be happening is that their identity is not being legitimized, or they feel it is under threat. When people’s identity is under threat, then they pull back and close ranks within their group to make that identity more secure. You can’t create a shared identity in a multi-party project if your own identity is not secure.
In turn, people need to feel a sense of control and autonomy, and a meaningful say in decisions that affect you. In conservation, we have a history of treating the communities we work with as a box to tick. And if it feels to them like a box-ticking exercise, you’re not going to get the trust, or the collaboration, or shared problem solving. You’re also not going to get the longevity that you need to really address the problem once you’ve found a solution.
At the Center for Conservation Peacebuilding, where I work, we try to foster this ethos of conservation conflict transformation through a few strategies. First, we act as a neutral third-party in highly complex, controversial conservation conflicts. Second, we build other people’s capacity to do what we do. We’ve found that conservationists, ranchers, tribal government, environmentalists—they are better advocates and better placed to engage their communities and transform their own conflicts.
Let me give a few examples to show our approach in action. My colleagues were working in a conservancy in northern Mozambique, and every night they heard semi-automatic gunfire and then in the morning, they woke up to dead and defaced elephants. In one year, they found 2,000 elephants killed. They came into our conservation conflict transformation workshop and they were like, “this is not how we were taught to do conservation.” But they tried our approach and they radically changed everything they did. They changed their relationships, their processes, and the outcome. The next year, they found only eight dead elephants.
Then later on in Hawaii, we had another success story. We taught a group there how to use conservation conflict transformation in their work, and they were able to develop public-private partnerships to successfully reintroduce the Hawaiian crow.
Often, there’s deeper roots to conflicts, a history of unresolved disputes.
Meanwhile, in Tanzania, we had a workshop and a Maasai gentleman came. What had happened was that the Tanzanian government had taken this large chunk of land and split it in two and said, “here Maasai pastoralists, you get this half, and here, Hadza hunters, you get this half.” But that essentially sliced each group’s traditional lands in half. And so the Maasai and the Hadza had this growing rift, as neither group could get their needs met. Well, this Maasai gentleman, he went back and he brought the Hadza and the Maasai together, and facilitated a dialogue between them. They figured out a way to share their land so that each group’s way of life could persist.
Similarly, in the Galapagos in 2014, we managed to get 100 percent buy-in on a program of invasive species eradication for island restoration despite the government initially being very wary of the sheer size of the project and the local people being wary of how much effort it would require to be successful. But that project is still ongoing now.
And finally, in Washington State in the United States, we had a project involving wolves. Wolves are one of the most controversial and divisive conservation conflicts. But by bringing hunters, law enforcement, government, animal welfare, conservationists, and farmers together, they were able to take this divisive issue and turn it into something that could bring them together and help build respect and shared understanding. And ultimately, they made really complex policy decisions together.
How long does all this work take, you might ask? Well, it depends. The Galapagos project, for example, involved two weeks on the ground and about four months of preparation before that. The Washington wolf project, on the other hand, took three and a half years. It can take years to build trust, but if you bring people together in the right way, then building that trust can become more efficient and effective, getting you further faster.
Conservation conflict transformation is not one single process. It is context dependent. We need to look at what the society needs, and what scale we are working at. Who needs to be engaged? And what does that engagement look like? I always start with one-on-one engagement, and try to meet people on all sides of the conflict to get a 360-degree view of what is going on. And in particular, I try to start with any internal conflicts that one side is dealing with. Each context is different, and one size won’t fit all.
There are lessons here that anyone working in conservation can apply to their own work. Sometimes, if a conflict is really bad, you need a third, neutral party to come in. But transformation can happen within small teams, and even as a result of one stakeholder taking the lead.
Ultimately, if you have a stake in a project’s success, that can be enough. Any conservation project depends on the stakeholders, not on a neutral third-party. Engage with the principle of conservation conflict transformation—go deep, go wide, go long, respect one another’s human needs—and a path can open up in even the most difficult circumstances. 
Lead image: melitas / Shutterstock
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