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Contribution short abstract

We examine how human and nonhuman actors co-produce landscape change and livelihoods in Hungary’s Sand Ridge region. Drawing on interview analysis and natural archives, we analyse local interpretations of aridification, land-use pressures, and prospects for multispecies adaptive strategies.

Contribution long abstract

The Sand Ridge has undergone rapid aridification and landscape transformation over the past two centuries, with marked acceleration since the 1980s. While these changes have attracted growing research attention, multispecies and more-than-human political ecological perspectives remain underused despite their relevance. This paper combines new materialist approaches with critical political economy to examine how inanimate actants (water, sand, wind) and diverse flora and fauna (grazing livestock, introduced plants, invasive species) interact with historically situated forms of socio-economic organization to shape the region’s landscape and multi-species livelihoods.

Drawing on interviews with local stakeholders, the paper analyses how people living in and from the land perceive these socio-ecological processes. It highlights interviewees’ assessments of the roles and potentials of animate and inanimate nonhuman entities in co-creating landscapes and livelihoods, and considers how such understandings might support renewed strategies of multispecies collaborative adaptation.

Empirically, the study focuses on two sites. The first is a small border town once known for tomato production but now severely affected by the drastic decline of the groundwater table. The second is a historic wine-growing area with relatively favourable soils, where wine-related tourism is expanding while conservation efforts face pressure from recurring drought and the political embeddedness of some landowners and the fishing community.

Our approach offers new momentum for collective reflection among researchers and practitioners working in the region, and contributes to building counter-narratives grounded in residents’ own insights, as well as the natural archives of the region.

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We explored how cultural beliefs, environmental factors, conservation policies, local tolerance, and socio-economic aspects determine HEC in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in southern India. Our ethnography emphasizes more on animistc beliefs of communities across borders.

Contribution long abstract

We explored how cultural beliefs, environmental factors, conservation policies, local tolerance, and socio-economic aspects determine HEC in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve in southern India. Based on these factors, we focus on how HEC magnitudes differ across the three bordering states, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Our ethnography emphasizes more on animistc beliefs of communities across borders: As per local beliefs elephants still follow aanataras (ancestral movement routes). The Soliga community pays respect to an elephant deity Aanabommaraya before cultivation for a better crop yield. We found that elephants’ movements across political borders are determined by ecological factors such as water availability, especially during the dry seasons. Rampant land use changes disrupt Aanataras creating fear landscapes within their habitat. The marginalised communities here experience socio-economic and psycho-social costs. Resultantly, the local tolerance towards elephants is decreasing and interspecies retaliatory killings are on the rise. These sentient nonhumans realise ‘fear landscapes’ and use their political awareness to navigate the shared space. Similarly, given the conservation status of elephants in India, humans are also aware of the political repercussions. We found that elephant agency guides the community’s choice of crop cultivation and daily practices. These interspecies interactions highlight the more-than-human perspectives in the shared space. We found that there are differences in approaches towards elephants based on ethnicity, cultural practices, religious ideologies, and access to government schemes. By delving into anthropomorphism we attempt to question anthropocentrism in a more-than-human world.

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We integrated ethnographic and ecological methods (like camera traps and satellite telemetry) to examine the interplay of human actors, nonhuman actors (elephants), and inanimate materials like haria (rice beer) and electric fences in shaping human-elephant conflict in North Bengal, India.

Contribution long abstract

Human-Elephant Conflict (HEC) is co-produced through a dynamic interplay between human actors, nonhuman actors, and inanimate materials like haria (rice beer) and electric fences. We deploy a more-than-human political ecology framework that uses a mixed-methods approach, which combines ethnographic findings with ecological data through camera traps and satellite telemetry. The combination of methods allows a nuanced understanding of how both humans and elephants perceive each other and navigate the shared landscape for better resources and survival. Elephants, through their increased state protection, emerge as political animals under the contemporary conservation regime, wherein they adapt to ‘weak’ retaliation by humans and modify local agricultural practices—behaviors reflecting interspecies cultural learning, adaptive intelligence, and political awareness.

Haria emerges as ‘less illegal’ than timber felling and remains a key livelihood option among the indigenous communities. However, as an actant, it acts as a double-edged catalyst, both attracting elephants and rendering intoxicated humans more vulnerable to HEC. Electric fences remain the most preferred technical intervention to mitigate HEC. Regression analysis shows that electric fences reduce the elephant-induced costs locally by 32% but also create a spillover effect of increased cost in the neighboring unfenced (40%) and weak-fenced (37%) villages.

Overall, this research calls for not only mitigating HEC but also transforming the conditions under which it prevails. This can be achieved by bringing together and recognizing the political lives of elephants, the cultural politics of haria, and the contested consequences of electric fences, instead of separating them through disciplinary, methodological, and political boundaries.

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This paper examines how elephants and conservation laws jointly shape mobility, fear, and livelihood in Wayanad. Using eight months of ethnography, it shows how more-than-human governance structures everyday life and argues for multispecies justice and Indigenous-centered conservation.

Contribution long abstract

This paper explores more-than-human political ecologies in a forest-fringe landscape in Wayanad, Kerala. Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with the Mullu Kurumans, a forest-dependent community in Wayanad (Kerala), the study examines how conservation laws regulate human behaviour as more-than-human actors, particularly elephants whose habitat vastly overlaps with that of humans. The presence of elephants shapes people’s mobility and livelihoods, instilling fear and anxiety and challenging the everyday decision-making of local human residents, thereby restructuring their daily routines and relationships with the forest. Borrowing the concept of ‘more-than-human governance,’ the paper argues that wildlife conservation in contemporary India operates through forms where animals and infrastructures, together, create regulatory systems that discipline movement, access, and subsistence by deterrence and surveillance of both elephants and humans.

By foregrounding Indigenous environmental relations and multispecies interactions, the paper shows that forest governance cannot be understood solely through human institutions. Instead, animals, ecologies, and technologies co-produce the conditions under which communities live, adapt, and resist and become ‘subjects’ of governance by both the state and the nonhuman neighbours. The study calls for rethinking conservation through frameworks of multispecies justice and Indigenous knowledge, arguing that sustaining forests requires recognising, not erasing, the long histories of human–nonhuman cohabitation that shape these landscapes.

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This paper addresses the theoretical and methodological contribution of the ontological turn to the study of HWI. We highlight how these frameworks unsettle long-standing conservation assumptions, provide new insights and contribute to methodological innovation and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Contribution long abstract

Responding to recent calls from within conservation science and the growing interdisciplinary field of coexistence studies, there is increasing recognition of the need to fundamentally rethink our relationships with nonhuman natures. This includes moving beyond conventional Eurocentric conservation and resource management paradigms, in ways that prioritise, rather than merely accommodate, local and Indigenous onto-epistemologies. This rethinking requires more sustained engagement with insights from the humanities and critical social sciences. To this end, this paper illustrates how recent theoretical propositions within the humanities can inform the emerging field of coexistence studies and mainstream critical approaches in conservation social sciences, such as political ecology, enhancing analyses and critiques of environmental inequalities and injustices. Specifically, we concentrate on more-than-human and political ontology frameworks. We focus on human-elephant coexistence, combining a review of interdisciplinary literature with ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate how these frameworks might inform research and our understanding of coexistence. We emphasise the value of foregrounding relationality, acknowledging nonhuman agency and autonomy, and recognising the multiplicity of worlds and ways of knowing in the way we approach human-wildlife coexistence. We provide insights into what relationality might look like in the field and how such orientations can reconfigure the questions we ask, the methods we employ, and the interpretations we make when studying human–wildlife coexistence. We propose that ethnographers conducting research in post-colonial contexts, particularly when collaborating with Indigenous peoples, reorient their approach through these lenses to engage meaningfully with local ways of knowing, practices, and relations with wildlife without imposing a Western onto-epistemology

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Contribution short abstract

As part of my doctoral dissertation on the political ecology of wolf conservation, I created the album KO:MI - Belonging in Nature. This presentation examines how music's emotional resonance can enhance our understanding of our relationships with other-than-humans.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation explores the intersection of political ecology and the arts, particularly through music, to examine how we understand our relationships with other-than-humans. In a world grappling with climate change and biodiversity loss, it’s essential to recognize that while we can never fully escape our human perspective, we can strive to understand other-than-human viewpoints. This is where the arts, and music specifically, can play an important role.

As part of my doctoral dissertation on the political ecology of wolf conservation, I created an album of music titled Belonging in Nature, which functioned both as an analytical tool and an output of the research. Music, as a non-verbal and non-visual medium, has a unique ability to connect directly with our emotions and intuitive understanding of the world. Artistic work included in social scientific research can create resonating experiences, and disrupt and animate discussions, providing deeper engagement with complex ideas. These characteristics also give music intriguing potential for gaining insight into other-than-human perspectives.

In this presentation, I will discuss how music creation can become a tool for analysis, while musical experiences can broaden the impacts of research both within and beyond academia, enriching our understanding of socio-ecological dynamics. By integrating artistic methods into political ecology, we can cultivate a more holistic view of our relationships with the more-than-human world. Ultimately, embracing the arts helps us navigate our human limitations and encourages us to take responsibility for the diverse lives that share our planet, paving the way for social change and environmental justice.

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My intervention reflects on how transgressing disciplinary and scientific boundaries can imagine and implement a praxis of solidarity and care for humans and more-than-humans in more-than-human political ecology, drawing on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary squirrel-human research.

Contribution long abstract

Western scientific norms are predicated on categorisation and conformity, such as what is (not) seen as acceptable knowledge or methods, what disciplines can (not) ask what questions, what species to (not) care about, and what is (not) acceptable output in what outlets. Such questions, generally more style than substance, can become more important than situating research in relation to political and social change. As we face widening environmental and social inequalities and climate breakdown, a research praxis rooted in identifying and addressing drivers of harm, and taking actions of solidarity towards humans and more-than-humans through intellectual, collaborative and communicative praxis becomes all the more important, including in how to travel, where and with whom to publish and how to communicate findings. My intervention reflects on the key question of how transgressing disciplinary and scientific boundaries can imagine and implement a focus on social change and justice for both humans and more-than-humans in more-than-human political ecology? Based on an interdisciplinary investigation into coexistence between and among (grey) squirrels and humans, I reflect on drawing on social science, natural science and humanities materials and methods as well as storytelling and visual approaches for research and knowledge exchange to promote solidarity both in what and how I research, but also in what and how I communicate. Such practices of everyday care both resist dominant forces driving conforming, for-profit research and education and personal promotion or gain, and are a vital step of building hope and solidarity in more-than-human political ecology and beyond.

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Using multispecies fieldwork in the Pantanal, this contribution examines how more-than-human political ecology can better engage with marginalised human experiences, revealing overlooked relations and supporting more just and grounded forms of coexistence with nonhumans.

Contribution long abstract

Grounded in multispecies fieldwork in the Brazilian Pantanal, this contribution considers how more-than-human political ecology can be methodologically operationalised and connected to broader questions of justice and coexistence. My research followed jaguar–human encounters on the river, engaged with guides, conservationists, Indigenous actors, and Pantaneiro families, and attended to the ecological and affective relations that shape tourism landscapes. These observations highlight jaguars as agentive beings that co-create interspecies interactions and guide how humans move, watch, and interpret the landscape.

At the same time, the fieldwork revealed processes through which certain human actors become less-than-human—marginalised, excluded from decision-making, or rendered invisible within dominant conservation and tourism narratives. In some instances, the intensification of more-than-human attention seemed to reinforce these dynamics, as the visibility of jaguars and other nonhumans overshadowed the lived experiences of marginalised human groups. This tension between nonhuman agency and human devaluation is an empirical reality that more-than-human political ecology must address more explicitly.

Working with multispecies assemblage provided a methodological space to integrate ecological cues, local knowledge, embodied experience, and social dynamics. Assemblages composed of jaguars, boats, prey species, river currents, photographic infrastructures, and tourist expectations show how landscapes are co-created and how power operates across species and institutions.

I offer these reflections to contribute to a collective discussion on how multispecies approaches might illuminate overlooked relations, challenge hierarchical knowledge practices, and support more inclusive and justice-oriented pathways to human–nonhuman coexistence.

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Contribution short abstract

Pluriversal Environmental Governance challenges Western anthropocentrism. Using Grounded Theory on Latin American data, governance is explained as co-governance with more-than-human political actors (Pachamama, plants), operationalising decolonial social change for environmental justice and degrowth

Contribution long abstract

The persistent global ecological crisis is symptomatic of a significant governance deficit, fundamentally rooted in dominant Western, anthropocentric, and colonial-extractivist paradigms. This research addresses this urgent need by centring Indigenous knowledge systems and relational cosmologies, which offer transformative pathways toward more just and sustainable human-environmental entanglements.

Employing a critical and decolonial research paradigm, and drawing upon Grounded Theory (GT), this study inductively generates a model of Pluriversal Environmental Co-Governance in Latin America. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews with Indigenous leaders, scholars, activists, and legal experts, forging transboundary collaborations that prioritize Indigenous epistemologies over a priori Western theory.

The generated model describes ecological stewardship rooted in relational ontologies and Indigenous jurisprudence interacting with colonial legacies. Key findings highlight profound ontological differences from Western frameworks, supporting a more-than-human political ecology. Indigenous systems perceive the environment as a community of political actors (e.g., Pachamama), dissolving the Western subject/object dichotomy and aligning with the Western juridical concept of Rights of Nature. Environmental degradation is interpreted as a relational disease stemming from the pathology of colonisation and objectification.

The study conceptualises governance as territorial co-governance, wherein critical decision-making incorporates the rights and agency of more-than-human entities, often mediated by spiritual dialogue. This Pluriversal configuration proposes a model of epistemic delinking from colonial modernity for environmental justice and degrowth, emphasising the ecological need to hold multiple worldviews in dialogue without reducing their difference to universal anthropocentric categories.