Shared Ground: The Project

ETHNOMAD PROJECT

SHARED GROUND

"Elephants, Land, and the Future of Coexistence in Bangladesh

"The question is not whether people or elephants should have the land, but whether a landscape can be planned intelligently enough for both to survive."

In northern Bangladesh, along the borderlands where the hills of Meghalaya descend toward the plains, elephants still move through a changing world.

They come at night. They cross fields, forest edges, village boundaries, roads, and administrative lines that mean nothing to them. They follow memory older than maps. Their routes were shaped by forest, water, season, hunger, and movement long before the land was divided into farms, borders, parks, settlements, and development plans.

For the people who live here, elephants are not symbols in a conservation poster. They are powerful, unpredictable, dangerous, and deeply real. They damage crops. They break houses. They create fear in the night. They injure and kill. They also belong to a landscape that is being squeezed, fenced, cultivated, fragmented, and misunderstood.

For the elephants, the same landscape has become harder to read. Forest routes are blocked. Food sources are reduced. Settlements expand. Farms now stand where corridors once opened. In many places, elephants are pushed into conflict not because they have changed, but because the land around them has.

Shared Ground is ETHNOMAD’s community-based elephant coexistence project in the Garo borderlands of northern Bangladesh. It begins with a simple but difficult premise: coexistence cannot be designed from an office. It has to be understood from the ground.

This project brings together conservation ethnography, community knowledge, corridor mapping, land-sharing, education, and carefully managed field-based tourism. Its purpose is not to turn elephants into entertainment. Its purpose is to ask whether communities living with elephants can also benefit from protecting the conditions that allow both people and elephants to survive.

Note on the Location: Sherpur is not one of Bangladesh’s 12 formal IUCN elephant corridors, which are concentrated in Cox’s Bazar and Chittagong South. Its importance lies elsewhere. Sherpur is part of the northern transboundary elephant landscape, where elephants move between Meghalaya and Bangladesh through crossing points in Sreebordi, Jhinaigati, and Nalitabari. This makes it an ideal field site for Shared Ground, because the project is not only about corridors. It is about borderlands, farming, Garo communities, land pressure, and the practical challenge of coexistence.

Why This Project Matters

Bangladesh’s elephants currently generate almost no measurable national tourism revenue. Unlike countries where elephants are central to wildlife tourism, Bangladesh carries the costs of elephant presence without capturing much of its conservation, educational, cultural, or economic value.

Those costs are heavy.

Farmers lose crops. Families lose sleep. Some lose homes. Some lose relatives. Elephants are also killed through retaliation, electrocution, habitat pressure, poaching, and unmanaged conflict. What remains is a cycle of fear and loss on both sides.

This is not only a wildlife issue. It is a land issue. It is a planning issue. It is a cultural issue. It is a question of whether development, conservation, farming, Indigenous knowledge, and local livelihoods can be brought into the same conversation before the conflict becomes irreversible.

In the northern borderlands, many communities living near elephant routes are Garo, or A·chik Mande, an Indigenous matrilineal people whose relationship with land, farming, memory, kinship, and place remains central to cultural continuity. Their knowledge of landscape, crop cycles, forest edges, water, movement, and risk matters. It is not an accessory to conservation. It is part of the evidence.

Shared Ground begins there.

The problem with the usual approach

Too often, human-elephant conflict is treated as a technical problem. A map is drawn, then a fence is proposed, wire or more natural defenses from chillies to beehives. A warning system is installed to alert the local. This ends in a compensation form being created, and a report is written.

Some of these tools are necessary, but none of them is enough. They often miss the deeper questions:

Who owns the land elephants cross?
Who carries the greatest risk?
Who guards the fields at night?
Which crops attract elephants?
Where did elephants move before roads, farms, and fences changed the landscape?
What do older people remember that younger people no longer know?
Who is compensated, who is ignored, and who is expected to live with the consequences?
What would make local people see elephants not only as a threat, but as part of a possible future economy?

Without those questions, conservation becomes another administrative exercise. It may produce maps and meetings, but not trust. It may protect an animal in theory while leaving the people who live beside it feeling abandoned.

Shared Ground takes a different path.

Our approach

The project follows a clear sequence:

Ethnography first. Mapping second. Planning third.

Community-based tourism is only possible after trust, evidence, and local agreement.

This order matters.

You cannot build a coexistence model by starting with tourism. You cannot ask communities to share land with elephants before understanding what they have already lost. You cannot design corridors without listening to the people who know where elephants pass, when they come, what they eat, and how fear moves through a village after dark.

Shared Ground will begin with field-based ethnographic research among Garo and neighbouring farming communities in northern Bangladesh. We will document local knowledge, conflict histories, crop losses, night-guarding practices, memories of elephant movements, land-use change, and community attitudes toward conservation.

From there, we will work with communities, local authorities, conservation partners, and technical specialists to map elephant routes, conflict points, food sources, seasonal movement, and possible land-sharing zones.

The aim is to develop a practical pilot model where selected land, degraded plots, buffer areas, or negotiated corridor spaces can be planted with elephant-preferred food species and managed as part of a wider coexistence plan.

This is not random feeding. It is not baiting elephants for visitors. It is not spectacle.

It is planned habitat support, guided by local knowledge, ecological evidence, and community consent.

Feeding the corridor

One of the central ideas of Shared Ground is simple: if elephants are moving through a landscape in search of food, then conflict cannot be reduced only by pushing them away.

In some cases, the better question is where food should be available.

If elephants are repeatedly entering farms, destroying crops, and threatening lives, the landscape itself is already telling us something. Movement is happening. Hunger is present. Routes still exist, but they are broken. People are paying the price for that brokenness.

Shared Ground will explore whether carefully planned elephant food zones can reduce pressure on high-value crops and settlement areas.

These zones may include bamboo, banana, Napier grass, and other locally appropriate fodder and habitat species. They would be placed only after participatory mapping and ecological review. They would need to be located away from houses and sensitive areas, linked to known movement routes, and managed with clear community agreement.

The goal is not to domesticate wild elephants. The goal is to reduce conflict by making the landscape more intelligent.

A landscape that offers no safe route and no natural food will eventually produce conflict. A landscape that recognises movement, hunger, farming, fear, and livelihood may begin to offer another possibility.

Community-based tourism, not elephant entertainment

Shared Ground will not promote elephant rides, captive elephant shows, staged encounters, or dangerous viewing experiences.

That model belongs in the past. The future is different.

The tourism component of Shared Ground will be based on learning, field interpretation, cultural respect, and community benefit. Visitors will not come to command elephants. They will come to understand the landscape in which people and elephants are trying to survive.

Possible activities include:

Guided corridor walks with trained local interpreters.
Garo culture stays linked to ETHNOMAD’s wider work in northern Bangladesh.
Community-led storytelling on land, farming, elephants, memory, and change.
School and university field visits.
Human-elephant conflict learning programmes.
Research placements for students and conservation practitioners.
Training for local youth as guides, monitors, and field assistants.
Visitor contributions to a community conservation fund.

This model does not treat culture as performance or elephants as attractions. It treats the landscape as a place of learning.

The Garo borderlands

The first phase of Shared Ground will focus on the northern Garo borderlands of Bangladesh, with particular attention to Sherpur and its links to the wider Mymensingh-Garo cultural landscape.

Sherpur offers one of the clearest human-elephant conflict front lines. Elephants move across the border from the Meghalaya side, entering farms and settlements where people already live with economic pressure, land scarcity, and uncertainty.

Mymensingh provides the wider cultural frame. Garo communities across this region hold deep knowledge of farming, land, kinship, forest memory, and social change. Their matrilineal traditions and relationship with land are central to understanding how conservation must be negotiated in human terms.

This is why Shared Ground is not simply an elephant project.

It is a project about land, memory, movement, risk, and the possibility of a more intelligent form of conservation.

What We Will Do

1. Ethnographic fieldwork

ETHNOMAD will document how communities experience elephant conflict in daily life. This includes interviews, field observations, walking routes, household conversations, crop-loss narratives, night-guarding practices, oral histories, and community mapping.

The goal is to understand not only where conflict happens, but how it is felt, remembered, explained, and endured.

2. Participatory corridor mapping

We will work with local people, conservation specialists, and technical partners to map elephant movement, conflict hotspots, food sources, water points, crop-raiding routes, settlement pressure, forest fragments, road crossings, and potential coexistence zones.

Local knowledge will be treated as primary evidence, not anecdote.

3. Land-sharing assessment

The project will determine whether selected plots, buffer strips, degraded land, fallow fields, or already vulnerable crop areas could be converted into negotiated elephant food zones or corridor-support areas.

This will require careful landholder consultation, risk assessment, and legal review.

4. Elephant food-zone pilot

Where suitable and agreed, the project will test small-scale habitat and fodder restoration using locally appropriate species. The aim is to reduce conflict pressure by supporting movement and feeding away from homes and high-value crops.

5. Community training

Local youth and community members will be trained in basic monitoring, visitor interpretation, safety protocols, storytelling, field guiding, and conflict documentation.

This is essential. A project that does not build local capacity will not last.

6. Education and field tourism

Shared Ground will develop school programmes, university field modules, conservation walks, and host learning visits. These will create modest income streams while building a wider public understanding of human-elephant coexistence.

7. Community conservation fund

A portion of visitor fees, donor support, and research income should support local conservation priorities, monitoring, emergency response, education, and community benefit.

This fund must be transparent, locally understood, and tied to agreed outcomes.

What success would look like

Shared Ground will not pretend that human-elephant conflict can be solved quickly. It cannot.

Success means something more realistic and more useful:

A community has better evidence about elephant movement.
Farmers are heard before plans are made.
Local people gain income from conservation learning.
Children understand elephants as part of their landscape, not only as a danger.
Corridor routes are better documented.
A pilot food zone reduces pressure on crops.
Community monitors are trained.
Visitors contribute to the local benefit rather than extract experience.
Conservation partners gain a replicable model.
The national conversation shifts from conflict management to coexistence planning.

This is the measure that matters: whether the people living with elephants have greater security, greater authority, and a stronger reason to keep elephants alive.

Why ETHNOMAD

ETHNOMAD works at the intersection of culture, conservation, humanitarian practice, and field-based research. Our strength is not only in documenting landscapes, but in listening to the people whose lives are shaped by them.

Shared Ground fits our wider mission because it refuses to separate nature from culture.

Elephants are not moving through empty land. They are moving through farms, memories, fears, inheritance systems, border politics, development pressures, and communities trying to build a future.

To understand that properly, conservation needs more than biology. It needs ethnography. It needs local history. It needs land-use knowledge. It needs trust. It needs the discipline to listen before designing solutions.

That is where ETHNOMAD can contribute.

The Larger Vision

Shared Ground begins in Bangladesh, but the question it asks is global.

Across the world, people and wildlife are being forced into tighter spaces. Corridors are blocked. Rivers are controlled. Forests are fragmented. Indigenous and rural communities are asked to carry the costs of conservation without receiving its benefits.

Development plans often move faster than the landscapes they transform.

The old model is no longer enough.

We need a conversation that understands movement. We need planning that respects memory. We need tourism that gives back more than it takes. We need communities to be partners, not obstacles. We need landscapes designed for coexistence before conflict becomes permanent.

Shared Ground is one attempt to begin that work.

Not with theory alone.

With people. With elephants. With land. With listening. With maps drawn from lived experience. With a practical plan for sharing space in a crowded world.

The future of Bangladesh’s elephants will not be decided only in forests. It will be decided in fields, villages, borderlands, kitchens, schools, night watches, community meetings, and the narrow routes where elephants still try to pass.