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School of Geography and the Environment

University of Oxford
School of Geography and the Environment

 School of Geography and the Environment

IGS: Current and Recent Graduate Research

Maan Barua

The political ecology of Human-Elephant conflict in India

Supervisor(s):
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Curriculum Vitae:

Academic Profile

Maan Barua is a D.Phil. candidate at the School of Geography and Environment, University of Oxford. In 2007, he completed his BSc in Zoology from Dibrugarh University in Assam, India and then did an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the School. Maan is currently a Senior Hulme Scholar at Brasenose College, Oxford.

Current Research

In the past five years, elephants have killed 239 people in the northeast Indian state of Assam. In retaliation, humans have killed 265 elephants during the same period, wiping out 5% of the state's population. Human-elephant conflict is at the front-line of elephant conservation today, and is a serious problem involving elephants, humans as well as issues regarding land. Research on this issue is caught up in disciplinary boundaries, and there is a need for an inter-disciplinary approach in order to arrive at solutions to mitigate this conflict.

Maan's research focuses on the following key questions that will challenge and develop conservation practice:

  1. How are elephants and their landscape configured by various political and cultural actors? How does this structuring affect elephants and the conservation of elephants on the ground?
  2. Can people and elephants co-exist? If not, what are the possible ecological and cultural alternatives?
  3. What practical solutions are locally culturally acceptable? What are the dynamics that make these solutions politically possible?
Research Interests

Maan's interest in conservation began as he was growing up outside Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India. He has a broad range of research interests, the central idea of which is to develop a biocultural approach to conservation biology, merging natural and social science perspectives to bring new insights to existing theory and practice.

His areas of interest and current projects include:

  • Man-animal conflict: examining the ecological and social causes of conflict, particularly in South Asia;
  • Conservation beyond protected areas: Maan is currently developing an interdisciplinary project on Fig trees in Assam, examining the role of figs in species dispersal and how this might be affected by the landscape and cultural context. This is in collaboration with Aaranyak, a biodiversity conservation organisation in northeast India;
  • Surrogates in biodiversity: this is a continuation of his MSc research on elephants as flagship species and the agency they have in conservation. He is also interested in the ecological role of surrogates such as umbrella species and their relation to habitat connectivity;
  • Sampling Biodiversity: currently working on a project that aims at comparing different sampling methods for butterflies. Planned work in the future includes examining how parataxonomists and local knowledge may be used for biodiversity assessments; and
  • Media and conservation: looking at the role of the media and visual representation in conservation, and how practitioners might benefit from engaging with these institutions. He was awarded the D&E Zemenides Distinction (1st Prize) for his presentation on Media representations of human-elephant conflict [PDF: 789KB] at the Green College Welfare Conference, Oxford in 2008.
Consultancy & Editing

Publications

  • Barua, M. (2009) The Ecological Basis of the Bihu Festival of Assam. Folklore, 120: 213–223.
  • Barua, M. and Sharma, P. (2005) The Birds of Nameri National Park, India. Forktail, Journal of Asian Ornithology, 21: 15-26.
  • Naoroji, R., Sangha, H.S. and Barua, M. (2005) The Lesser Kestrel Falco naumanni and Amur Falcon Falco amurensis in the Garo Hills, Meghalaya, India. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 102(1): 103-104.
  • Barua, M. (2002) Occurrence of the Indian Skimmer Rhynchops albicollis Swainson in Assam. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, 99(3): 526.
  • Barua, M. and Sharma, P. (1999) Birds of Kaziranga National Park. Forktail, Journal of Asian Ornithology, 15: 47-60.