Paper short abstract:

This intervention examines how brown bears in Romania and their ecology were altered by historical management during communism, commercial trophy hunting in post-socialist years and recent regimes of protection by showing how habituation and ursine transgressions made the species ungovernable.

Paper long abstract:

Brown bears are the largest strictly protected carnivores within the European Union, and their recent strong comeback poses significant challenges to understanding conservation interventions across the continent. In Romania, while their recovery is celebrated by conservation practitioners, the management of the species is highly politicised, creating factions, brewing discontent and developing a landscape of distrust in public authorities, while questioning the legitimacy of scientific knowledge of hunters and conservationists alike. The paper discusses how brown bears and their ecology were altered by historical management during communism, commercial trophy hunting during post-socialist years and recent regimes of conservation. It shows how recent and current management practices triggered complex habituation responses. To captive breeding attempts, bears responded by seeking safety around human settlements. After decades of supplemental feeding at the hunting ground, they started raiding the waste bins in mountain resorts, while also crowding popular tourist roads. Governing bears is a messy endeavour in Romania; they belong to the state, are managed by hunters, and have enjoyed strict protection since 2016. However, they live their lives regardless of administrative boundaries, legal protection status and human-made thresholds of wilderness. These transgressions between wild and domesticated, wilderness and urban, wildlife and game, from being objects of human enjoyment to objects of human intervention, have made bears become ungovernable subjects. This intervention into the complexities of how ursine lives adapted to human intervention in Romania is done by bringing together insights from environmental history, green criminology and other-than-human political ecologies.