Convivial Constitutionality: Conditions for Human-Predator Cohabitation, Institutional Change and Ontological Contestations in a ‘Glocal’ World

The paper explores a new approach called ‘Convivial Constitutionality’, which uses an institutional and political ecology lens in anthropology to theorise the conditions for broader participatory engagement with conservation in the Global West. It critically discusses the convivial conservation approach (see Büscher and Fletcher, 2019, 2020), advocating a different way for humans and nature to coexist in newer conservation approaches. Unlike fortress, co-management and new conservation models, convivial conservation is not a top-down approach. However, the paper also addresses an issue that convivial conservation shares with previous approaches: insufficient engagement with the ontological perception of the environment held by local societies in a more-than-human commons, and a lack of reflection on how these people have transformed their areas into cultural landscapes via common property institutions. The paper argues that the colonial legacy, historical aspects of green commons grabbing in a ‘glocal’ world, and local capabilities to craft new rules and regulations in a participatory, bottom-up manner, based on previous local institutions (property rights, rules, regulations, and norms), should be emphasised more. Considering these aspects, the term ‘conservation’ and its ideology should also be critically reflected upon when it comes to participatory approaches for the bottom-up building of institutions for the commons. This latter process is referred to as the constitutionality approach (Haller et al. 2016), which draws on a combined New Institutionalist and Political Ecology model (NIPE).