Transforming human-bear coexistence from the bottom up: Integrating human and non-human animal perspectives into local coexistence strategies

Human-wildlife coexistence is increasingly central to biodiversity action in Europe’s shared landscapes. While conservation policies and protected areas have supported wildlife recovery, including large carnivores, coexistence remains challenging in many regions. In this talk, we present how we applied IPBES TCA strategies in practice, demonstrating how local governance innovation and knowledge co-creation (strategies 4 & 5) can drive transformative change for human-wildlife coexistence.

Our Participatory Action Research (PAR) examines how integrating local human and wildlife perspectives into coexistence planning can foster a paradigm shift: moving from local communities relying on conservation authorities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to actively leading coexistence strategies addressing more-than-human needs. Brown bears both shape and depend on ecosystems in ways that mirror human-ecosystem interactions, with possible negative impacts from bears to humans and vice versa. We present a case study from the Italian Apennines, where people coexist with the critically endangered Apennine brown bear (Ursus arctos marsicanus). Here, the NGO Rewilding Apennines leads the Bear-Smart Corridor project, establishing “bear-smart communities” to empower local communities to govern coexistence in areas of bear population expansion.

We focus on three evolving bear-smart communities, where bears are currently returning and coexistence governance is weak. In these communities, we collaborated with three municipal coexistence committees composed of farmers, hunters, beekeepers, administrators, tourism operators, and “bear representatives.” Committees identified challenges, co-designed actions, and co-developed municipal coexistence strategies through iterative cycles of workshops, participatory spatial mapping, and implementation of coexistence measures. Workshops combined social-ecological system (SES) network mapping, including bears as social actors, with the Three Horizons visioning approach to explore human-bear-ecosystem dependencies and pathways toward desired future coexistence. Outcomes included place-based municipal plans for coexistence measures with defined locations and responsibilities for three years (e.g., bear-proof bins and fences, coexistence festivals, and education initiatives).

Our case study shows that municipal committees adopting more-than-human perspectives can draw on deep local ecological knowledge and SES frameworks to design context-specific coexistence strategies, while creating institutional space for wildlife actors. Such PAR approaches can support bottom-up transformation of human-wildlife coexistence that values both human and non-human quality of life.