Alberta, Canada’s grizzly bears remain a threatened species, with ongoing controversy limiting achievements. Using a social constructionist approach, together with wildlife value orientations and attitudes descriptions within social process mapping, we explored what grizzly bears and recovery mean to people. Semi-structured interviews revealed unique sub-groups, including Homesteader, Frontiersmen, Exurbans, and government Biologists and Officers, whose values are reflective of their identity. While utilitarian or mutualistic orientations were helpful, uncovering identity in relation to values, as part of historical socio-cultural conditions and policy processes, illustrated the importance of power in grizzly bear governance. Our findings suggest collaborative policy processes should be established, to build understanding, relations of trust, and identify common ground to benefit people and bears. Broadly, we suggest researchers look to utilizing qualitative approaches, as well as social constructionism and social process mapping, to better understand and articulate the importance of social-cultural conditions and processes in conservation policy.

Across their North American range, grizzly bears ( Ursus arctos ) occupy a special place in human imagination, as icons of nature's rugged and raw power, to representations of safety risks and economic costs of living with carnivores. Different bear representations can also be found across news media, from controversial and sensational descriptions of attacks, tragic events and conflicts, to scientific accounts of conservation research. News media certainly has the power to pique curiosity, spark debate, or elicit emotional responses through framing and repetition of content. In turn, news stories can influence how people might interpret and internalize information about grizzly bears. Using media content analysis, we examined newsprint stories on grizzly bears across their North American range between 2000 and 2016, to understand message framing and attention cycle, as well as attitudinal expression and representative anecdote conveyed to the readership. We found that human–bear conflict stories are over‐reported compared to other narratives, where a single incidence garners more attention than a story about new scientific findings. We also found articles that included hunting frames largely originated in Alberta, likely due to the threatened species listing and hunting moratorium. Attitudinal expressions included ecological, negative or neutral, and moral sentiments toward bears. The most common representative anecdote conveyed to the readership reflected the dire state faced by grizzly bears. The bear eco‐gossip expressed in the articles we reviewed, which included clear protagonists and antagonists and the occasional man‐bites‐bear surprise, appears to be the diet of manufactured information fed to the public. Results of our study can help scientists and conservationists understand how news media portrays grizzly bears to the public and how this might influence public sentiment toward their conservation, but also identifies the roles that scientists, conservationists and journalists together can play in crafting effective, factual and engaging news stories about bears.

We explored the perceptions held by subsistence farmers (living in communal lands within the CAMPFIRE programme area in northwestern Zimbabwe) towards the African lion (Panthera leo) and related conservation interventions undertaken by management authorities. Conceptually guided by the cognitive hierarchy, we used a semi-structured, face-to-face interview format to collect data across three different farming communities bordering Hwange and Zambezi National Parks. Ordinal regression models were used to analyse the data. Our results illustrate that farmers' perceptions towards lions were strongly negative and appeared to be associated with the geographic location in which the farmer lived, as well as the farmer's ethnic group. We also found that perceptions towards lions were not associated with specific livestock losses or to the potential benefits farmers received from wildlife conservation, e.g. school classroom blocks or road improvements. Instead, we suggest that fear of lions and perceived risk to livestock or human wellbeing may play a stronger role in shaping farmers' perceptions compared to actual livestock losses. Moreover, we suggest that sharing information across farmer social networks within a community area, along with the potential for media attention over sensational events, may also influence perceptions towards lions. Our results contribute a baseline dataset for future applied research in this area, and provide insight into developing locally-meaningful conservation interventions, including the type of information to be shared, channels for communication, and the benefits derived from participating in wildlife conservation.

Conservation scientists are increasingly recognizing the need to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to improve human–wildlife coexistence across different contexts. Here we assessed the long-term efficacy of the Long Shields Community Guardians programme in Zimbabwe. This community-based programme seeks to protect livestock and prevent depredation by lionsPanthera leothrough non-lethal means, with the ultimate aim of promoting human–lion coexistence. Using a quasi-experimental approach, we measured temporal trends in livestock depredation by lions and the prevalence of retaliatory killing of lions by farmers and wildlife managers. Farmers that were part of the Long Shields programme experienced a significant reduction in livestock loss to lions, and the annual number of lions subject to retaliatory killing by farmers dropped by 41% since the start of the programme in 2013, compared to 2008–2012, before the programme was initiated. Our findings demonstrate the Long Shields programme can be a potential model for limiting livestock depredation by lions. More broadly, our study demonstrates the effectiveness of community-based interventions to engage community members, improve livestock protection and ameliorate levels of retaliatory killing, thereby reducing human–lion conflict.

Since their threatened species listing in 2010, grizzly bear recovery has been a controversial policy issue in Alberta, Canada particularly because this charismatic carnivore represents a diverse set of values, both positive (e.g., an icon of beauty and the wilderness) and negative (e.g., a safety threat and economic risk to peoples’ livelihoods). Previous human dimensions research on grizzly bear conservation has accounted for the values and attitudes different groups of people hold for these bears, as well as their views on conflict mitigation strategies. However, the conservation literature is more limited in assessing the perspectives different people hold for grizzly bear conservation in a policy context. Arguably, understanding the policy landscape in which carnivore conservation occurs is important to achieve desired goals and objectives for species and the people expected to live with them and implement policy action. Using a case study approach between 2012 and 2014 and borrowing from the policy sciences problem-oriented framework, we identify the dominant problem perspectives in Alberta’s grizzly bear recovery policy using document review and interviews with participants from government, the natural resource sector, and environmental non-governmental organizations. We identify that ordinary and constitutive problem perspectives share common features across participants in this study, including frustrations with lack of policy clarity, implementation inefficiencies and committed political and financial action, and perhaps even more important, the challenges in policy decision-making and governance. We discuss the importance of meaningful engagement of people who live with large carnivores and the impacts of conservation policy, which is applicable to both a local and global scale, as success in large carnivore conservation must include the people who will ultimately implement conservation action.