Contribution short abstract

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.