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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 interactions in India

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Academic Profile

Maan Barua is a D.Phil. candidate doing interdisciplinary research in geography with a focus on conservation. Maan is part of the Conservation Governance Lab at the School of Geography and the Environment, a research group working on how conservation actors build, extend and legitimate their influence. In 2007, he completed his BSc in Zoology from Dibrugarh University in Assam, India and then went on to do an MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford. Maan is on a Clarendon Scholarship, and is a Senior Hulme Scholar at Brasenose College.

Current Research

D.Phil. Research

The Asian elephant is a cultural icon and an endangered species with a population of c. 40,000 individuals surviving in the wild. Twenty percent of the world's human population exists alongside the elephant's current range, resulting in loss of food sources, disruption of migration routes and compromise in space for elephants. In India alone, elephants kill 150-200 people every year and damage crops worth US$ 1,000,000. In retaliation, humans kill around 200 wild elephants annually. Human-elephant conflict is at the front-line of elephant conservation today, and is a complex issue involving elephants, humans as well as issues regarding land.

Research on human-wildlife conflict is largely informed by the ecological sciences. Strategies for conserving elephants have often failed to work on the ground as they are often driven by global conservation agendas and practices that have little to do with local socio-cultural dynamics. Historical and social aspects of human interactions with animals and landscapes, an area of inquiry now emerging in human and cultural geography, is yet to be taken up by conservationists.

Maan's DPhil research seeks to challenge and develop perspectives in geography and conservation through three distinct, yet inter-related strands of engagement:

  1. A historical analysis of the emergence of elephant conservation and the role inter-species encounters play in this;
  2. An examination of the spatial aspects of human-elephant interactions, especially how the social ordering of space influences mappings and management of elephant landscapes; and
  3. An investigation of elephant conservation policy to unravel how they are formulated and contested by different actors enmeshed in conservation networks.
Elephant
Elephant damage.
Research Interests

Maan's research stems from an attempt to address key theoretical concerns in conservation and geography: (1) recognising the place of nonhuman actors in the fabric of social life and to explore new possibilities that arise when their part is registered in our accounts of the world; (2) re-examining the relationship between conservation theory and practice to understand how interventions are normalized and what reflexivity regarding involvement has to offer; and (3) 'locating' culture in practices and frameworks of conservation to cross-fertilize ideas and enable the emergence of an attuned conservation science incorporating culture.

Current research areas include:

  1. Conservation beyond Protected Areas
    The dismantling of the island-sea analogy of conservation biogeography when considering terrestrial systems poses challenges to traditional conservation practice in several ways: How do we engage with the non-reserve matrix, a landscape where nature-culture distinctions are blurred? How do we grasp the challenges these reorientations of the topologies of wildlife conservation pose for governance and sustainable management?

    Research Project 2009 -
    Maan is the Principal Investigator of an inter-disciplinary project on the Conservation of Figs and Frugivores in Agroecosystems in Assam, India. The objectives of this project are:
    1. To investigate the role of Ficus trees as a food-source for frugivores and dispersal 'stepping stones' in agroecosystems outside protected areas; and
    2. To explore practice formations related to the constitution and maintenance of Ficus in these agroecosystems.
    This project has been funded by the Rufford Small Grants Foundation, and is a collaboration of academics at the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford, NGOs and naturalists from the local community in Assam.
    Ficus tree.
  2. Human-animal Interactions: Culture and Conflicts
    How do inter-species encounters influence conservation governance and shape particular modes of conservation practice? How do human-wildlife conflicts reorient the actions of different social actors and what are their ethical and practical implications? Maan recently co-authored a chapter on how bird conservation in the UK is constituted by interactions with bitterns and sustained by particular English ethnicities. His other strand of inquiry in this area is to situate human-wildlife conflicts in a broader socio-cultural context to understand hidden costs of conflicts, problems of compensation schemes and the politics of mitigation.
  3. Developing Interdisciplinary Methods in Conservation Science
    Integrating social science methods into conservation science has been recognised as vital for it to succeed. Maan is particularly interested in developing culturally-sensitive ways of doing conservation. Recent work includes exploring potential ways of incorporating non-expert knowledge in conservation practice (particularly through studies of media and conservation / developing alternative biodiversity sampling methods involving indigenous knowledge).

Teaching

Maan runs a reading group on Human-wildlife Conflict for the MSc in Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at the School of Geography and the Environment, and teaches on the Conservation Option for undergraduates studying Human Sciences at Oxford.

Consultancy & Editing

Publications