Authors: Kamdar, Arjun; Smith, David;Nagendra, Harini;Baishya, Hiten;Ratnam, Jayashree;Sekar, Nitin;

With hundreds of human and elephants deaths in India annually, reducing human-elephant conflicts (HEC) is essential for elephant conservation as well as social justice. Non-lethal electric fences placed around villages are a widely used intervention to mitigate HEC. In order for such barriers to work, beneficiaries have to act collectively to maintain the fence, making it a ‘public good’. However, despite their effectiveness when maintained, a majority of these fences are poorly maintained. Thus, our central question was why some fences in the landscape are well-maintained and others poorly-maintained. We studied 19 such fences in northeast India using an interdisciplinary approach, combining qualitative comparative analysis, Ostrom’s social-ecological systems (SES) framework, and a grounded theory approach incorporating ecological and qualitative social science tools. We find that contrary to our hypothesis, there are three potential pathways of maintenance; (1) a community maintainer, (2) the community self-organizes, and (3) the forest department. Maintenance occurs when there is a congruence between perceived costs and benefits for any one of these entities. These include not just material benefits but also intangibles like goodwill, sense of safety, social standing, and a feeling of fairness. We highlight these factors and provide recommendations for practitioners and policy.