Throughout the world, people resettle to reduce vulnerability to potentially dangerous wildlife, including elephants. In turn, they may become subject to development policies and practices that can either exacerbate or alleviate their vulnerability. Our ethnographic study in the Okavango Delta of Botswana, where 18,000 elephants share territory with 16,000 people, examines how resettlement decisions and settlement policies impacted vulnerability to elephants. We found that people who came into regular conflict with elephants frequently relocated from cattleposts to villages. Although people historically resettled near family, in 2015 a newly introduced “first-come, first-served” residential plot allocation policy spatially separated families within the village, creating further vulnerability for households relying on kinship networks. We found that government planning that incorporates locally available strategies, such as the ability to access support from kinship networks, may reduce vulnerability for those forced to resettle by elephant encroachment on their land.

在世界各地，人们重新定居以减少对包括大象在内的潜在危险野生动物的脆弱性。反过来，他们可能会受到可能加剧或减轻其脆弱性的发展政策和做法的影响。我们在博茨瓦纳的奥卡万戈三角洲进行的民族志研究研究了重新安置决策和安置政策如何影响大象的脆弱性，那里有 18,000 头大象与 16,000 人共享领地。我们发现，经常与大象发生冲突的人经常从牛场搬到村庄。尽管人们历来在家庭附近重新安置，但 2015 年新推出的“先到先得”的住宅地块分配政策在空间上将村庄内的家庭分开，使依赖亲属网络的家庭更加脆弱。