Managing wild emotions: Wildlife managers as intermediaries at the conflictual boundaries of access relations

• Published in: Geoforum 2022-06, Vol.132, p.103-112
• Main Authors: Epstein, Kathleen, Hobson Haggerty, Julia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access; Affective labor; American West; Cervus elaphus; Commodification; Elk; Elk management; Emotional labor; Emotions; Governance; Hunting; Interpersonal conflict; Land use; Landowners; Landscape; Managers; Political economy; Private lands; Privatization; Resource management; Social conditions; Social conditions & trends; Social relations; State wildlife agencies; Wildlife; Wildlife habitats; Wildlife management
• ISSN: 0016-7185; 1872-9398
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.04.004

•Growing conflicts over elk in the Greater Yellowstone, USA necessitate that wildlife managers utilize affective and emotional strategies to facilitate public access for hunting on private lands.•Wildlife managers are intermediaries in access conflicts, emphasizing the role of affective and emotional labor in building and maintaining access relations.•Wildlife managers’ work poses normative questions about the responsibilities and burdens born by individuals in sustaining resource management institutions. This study uses Ribot and Peluso’s access analysis to examine conflicts over elk and elk management in Greater Yellowstone USA, a region where emerging patterns of privatization and commodification have profound influence over the micropolitics of hunting access, and by extension resource governance. In North America, wildlife management via hunting has long relied on social relations and mutual obligations between rural hunters and landowners to facilitate access to game species like elk that frequent private land. However, transformations in the political economy of land use in and around Greater Yellowstone characterized by opportunities to commodify elk and access to them has influenced the region’s access regime, resulting in widespread declines in public hunting access on private lands. Intense conflict over elk and elk management has ensued. Drawing on ethnographic engagement with wildlife managers in rural working landscapes of Wyoming and Montana in and around Greater Yellowstone, our study reveals that facilitating social relations at the crossfires of elk access conflict requires a deftness for navigating interpersonal dynamics, a learned expertise manifested as affective and emotional labor. In the eyes of wildlife managers, these affective and emotional strategies are critical to fostering the social conditions for effective wildlife management and, more specifically, to gaining and maintaining access to privately held wildlife habitat. Our analysis emphasizes the responsibilities and burdens carried by intermediaries in struggles over access and resource management and highlights the threshold dynamics and normative questions that these burdens pose.