Unruly Natures is a research project that aims to better understand how people experience and interact with baboons in an urban setting.
This is a relevant research topic in many parts of the world, as human settlements and activities continue to expand. While the environmental impact is often negative, some wildlife find ways to survive or even thrive in cities’ predator-scarce, food-rich and artificially heated landscapes. Examples include otters in Singapore, badgers across UK towns, humpback whales in New York harbour, and leopards in Mumbai. This can lead to both positive and negative interactions between people and wildlife. Public opinion and understanding are often divided regarding the best way to respond to the presence of wildlife in cities. The urban setting, therefore, poses new challenges to landscape management, wildlife conservation, and environmental stewardship.
The Unruly Natures project focuses on the perspective of residents in baboon-visited neighbourhoods. Cape Town presents a unique set of examples of this, with a variety of challenges depending on differences in geography, baboon troop dynamics, and socioeconomic conditions, as well as decades of debate around the topic. Importantly, the project does not attempt to resolve all issues or prescribe solutions, but primarily to provide a better understanding of residents’ own lived experiences of and attitudes towards baboons. We hope to involve interested stakeholders in the research process and share findings in a way that can contribute to a mutual understanding of different viewpoints on a complex issue, and point to areas of potential collaboration.
What we want to study
Unruly Natures is guided by three research questions:
- How do personal experiences shape residents’ attitudes towards baboons?
- What do residents think of different efforts to manage baboons in their area?
- Can a better understanding of, and empathy for, different viewpoints help identify areas of collaboration?
It is also worth mentioning what the project does NOT try to do. We do not study baboons themselves. We do not seek to achieve any specific policy goal, and we are not receiving funding from anyone apart from what is declared at the bottom of this webpage. We do not try to undermine or replace pre-existing efforts to understand, protect, manage or lobby for baboons and baboon-related issues.
How we plan to do it
The type of research we do is designed to combine academic expertise with the local knowledge held by people who regularly experience urban wildlife. First of all, we have invited residents to influence the direction of the project by joining or nominating members to our Advisory Board, which meets regularly for the duration of the project. Second, we use research tools that collects data in the form personal narratives about participants’ own experiences of baboons, and how these have shaped their views about the human-baboon relations. We collect such stories from residents in a range of baboon-visited neighbourhoods. Third, we present preliminary insights back to research participants, other residents within the research area, and stakeholders. This uses residents’ own stories to help illustrate different viewpoints and serve as a basis for reflections and discussions. While consensus might be hard to reach, we hope to foster a mutual understanding of and empathy for different views and safe space to explore collaborations between residents, communities and other stakeholders.
The project is funded for 2022-2025 by a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas: 2021-00780) through the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.
See potential for collaboration?
Photo credit: J.Enqvist
Unruly Natures Project 