What does coexistence mean? Insight from place‐based trajectories of pastoralists and bears encounters in the Pyrenees

Abstract The recovery of large carnivores in Europe raises issues related to sharing landscape with humans. Beyond technical solutions, it is widely recognized that social factors also contribute to shaping coexistence. In this context, scholars increasingly stress the need to adopt place‐based approaches by analysing how humans and wildlife interact and co‐adapt in specific landscapes. In the burgeoning field of ‘more‐than‐human’ geography, both humans and non‐humans are considered as co‐constitutive of places. According to this tradition, animals should not simply be seen as objects under human control but approached as powerful actors in multi‐species landscapes. By tracking how brown bear recovery in the French Pyrenees has shaped different places of encounters with pastoralists (i.e. farmers and shepherds in extensive sheep farming in mountain pastures during summer), this paper discusses what coexistence means when viewed through the lens of more‐than‐human geography. We use an in‐depth, retrospective and multi‐sources approach to describe the inter‐relationships of bears and pastoralists on three mountain pastures since the return of bears at the end of the 1990s. Semi structured interviews, participant observation, administrative and institutional data about bear depredation and genetics, as well as pastoral practices form the basis of an integrated narrative analysis. Our study reveals how the return of a large carnivore has produced three different, singular, context‐specific coexistence ‘patches’. Each of these three pastures represent a distinct landscape dynamically shaped over time by bears, pastoralists and the rest of biotic and abiotic environment. Specifically, we demonstrate how various factors—the individual behaviour of bears, their movement and reproduction capacity, the number of depredations, the pastoralists' histories, their collective organization, the choices they made, the pastures' features, the available resources and surrounding vegetation—cumulatively intertwine in complex, place‐specific entanglements. Policy implications . Our results suggest that coexistence should not be conceptualized as global, top down and standardized. Instead it is shaped by patches in which humans and non‐humans interact in specific ways. Therefore, fostering coexistence means acknowledging the full diversity of situations in which people and wildlife write their own place‐based, more‐than‐human histories. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.