The ecology of blame: conflicts beyond the encounter, diffused responsibility, and governance of delay in South India

Abstract Human–wildlife conflict (HWC) is often approached through the immediate encounter between humans and animals and its material consequences, including crop loss, injury, compensation, deterrence, and habitat management. This paper argues that the encounter is only one moment within a longer temporality of conflict. Drawing on narrative-based qualitative fieldwork in forest-fringe regions of South India, it examines how wildlife-related conflicts are shaped by conditions that precede particular encounters, including histories of dispossession, ecological change, unequal conservation authority, and the marginalisation of local ecological knowledge, and how they continue beyond them through waiting, compensation procedures, infrastructural failure, bureaucratic delay, and contested responsibility. The paper uses human–human conflict (HHC) not to replace the ecological dimensions of HWC, but to identify the social and institutional conflicts through which wildlife-related risk is produced, interpreted, distributed, and governed. The “problem of many hands” is used as a bounded ethical lens to examine a particular governance paradox: authority may remain concentrated while responsibility for response is dispersed across administrative offices and levels, producing difficult-to-locate answerability and consequential delay. Through three narratives, the paper shows that HWC is simultaneously ecological, social, institutional, and historical. Its contribution is therefore to shift analysis from the encounter as a discrete event toward conflict as an extended trajectory whose antecedents and consequences shape vulnerability, responsibility, institutional trust, and possibilities for coexistence.