Human Wildlife Conflict and Opportunities for Co-existence

Human-wildlife conflicts are on the rise in Zimbabwe; and co-existence between the two can be hardly achieved in the short-term due to numerous socio-economic, environmental, institutional, and political conditions. There are challenges in defining the key concepts of conflict and co-existence among different stakeholders. Resultantly, conservationists devise solutions that are inapplicable in solving critical conservation, conflict and co-existence challenges. For example, some incidents labelled human-wildlife conflict are not, but they are contestations among different stakeholders over conservation. In this introductory Chapter we discuss these concepts of human-wildlife conflict, human conflicts over wildlife, co-existence and conservation; by synthesizing their available working definitions as it is provided in the previous literature. This is pertinent in that it makes it easier for the reader to follow these issues as they are raised in the book. These issues prevail variedly in Zimbabwe, and different chapters based on fieldwork elucidate these variations as they occur in different parts of the country.