Why This Term Keeps Coming Up
The phrase “lived experience” shows up frequently in conversations about wildlife management, but it is often used without explanation. When terms like this are left undefined, they can become catch-alls that mean different things to different people, which makes meaningful discussion harder rather than easier.
This article focuses on clarifying what lived experience means in a wildlife management context, how it develops, where it helps, and where it has limits. It is not intended to argue for specific policies or outcomes. Instead, it reflects the broader educational approach of Who Cares BC, which emphasizes understanding wildlife decisions through multiple ways of knowing, including science, Indigenous Knowledge, and long-term familiarity with place. More about this approach can be found on the About page.
Before moving forward, it is important to be clear about what this article will not do. It does not rank knowledge systems. It does not suggest that one perspective should replace another. Its purpose is to slow the conversation down and explain how lived experience fits within a broader decision-making landscape.
A Clear Definition
In wildlife management, lived experience refers to understanding that develops through repeated return to the same places over time. It forms by being present across different seasons and conditions, and by noticing how patterns, relationships, and landscapes change.
This understanding builds gradually. It depends on continuity and comparison, on being able to recognize what is typical for a place and what is not. Its value comes from familiarity developed over years, not from isolated moments.
Lived experience does not function on its own. It sits alongside other ways of understanding wildlife and habitat, each of which contributes something different to how decisions are made.
How Lived Experience Is Built Over Time
Lived experience develops slowly, and its depth is shaped by time.
In the early years of spending time in a particular landscape, familiarity is often practical. People learn how access changes with weather, where wildlife is commonly encountered, and how seasonal conditions influence movement. Observations at this stage tend to describe what is seen, rather than how it compares to the past.
Over longer periods, repeated return allows patterns to emerge. People begin to notice differences between short-term variation and longer-term change. Migration timing may shift slightly. Habitat use may change following disturbance, recovery, or altered land use. These shifts are often subtle and easy to miss without a reference point built through years of observation.
With continued presence, observations become contextual. What is happening now can be compared to what happened before under similar conditions. This helps distinguish temporary changes from trends that may be developing over time.
This is why duration matters. Lived experience depends on returning to the same places often enough, and for long enough, to recognize how they behave across many conditions. Articles such as Seeing the Signs: How to Read the Land Like a Wildlife Steward and Wildlife Care Beyond the Season explore how understanding develops through long-term engagement rather than one-time visits.
Change in landscapes also unfolds over long cycles. Disturbance and recovery can take decades, not seasons. Discussions around forest health, including GOABC’s explanation of why Fire plays a role in healthy forests, help illustrate why short-term snapshots often miss the broader picture that only time can reveal.
Who Develops Lived Experience, and How
Lived experience does not belong to a single group. It develops wherever people return to the same landscapes consistently over long periods, often for different reasons but with similar results.
Indigenous guardians and wildlife monitors build lived experience through ongoing responsibility to specific territories. Their work involves repeated observation, tracking change, and maintaining continuity over time, guided by long-standing relationships with specific places.
Ranchers and agricultural workers develop familiarity by working the same lands year after year. Daily and seasonal presence allows them to notice changes in wildlife movement, forage availability, and timing, particularly where working landscapes overlap with habitat.
Foresters and other natural resource workers return to the same areas across planning, harvesting, and regeneration cycles. This long-term involvement provides perspective on how wildlife responds to changes in forest structure, access, and disturbance.
Conservation officers and wildlife professionals build lived experience through repeated response, monitoring, and enforcement within defined service areas. Familiarity grows through cumulative exposure to seasonal patterns, recurring conditions, and on-the-ground situations over time.
Guide outfitters also spend extended periods in defined areas over many years, often returning to the same locations across seasons. This repeated presence contributes to detailed familiarity with local wildlife behaviour and habitat conditions, alongside many other land users. Examples of how this kind of long-term stewardship work occurs are outlined in GOABC’s Conservation at Work overview.
Regular recreationists, including hikers, backcountry skiers, anglers, and mushroom pickers, also develop lived experience when they return to the same places consistently. Seasonal recreation and harvesting often follow annual rhythms that allow people to notice changes in access, wildlife presence, and environmental conditions that may not be visible during one-time visits.
GOABC’s discussion of sharing the land base highlights how many of these activities overlap in the same landscapes. What connects these experiences is not profession or authority, but continuity. Lived experience forms wherever people return to the same places often enough, and for long enough, to notice how those places change.
Where Lived Experience Helps
When understood within its limits, lived experience can add clarity in practical ways.
Long-term familiarity with a specific place can help interpret local variation. Wildlife patterns rarely look the same everywhere, even within the same region. Familiarity with place helps explain why conditions in one area may differ from those observed elsewhere, without assuming that one situation applies universally.
Lived experience can also help draw attention to early signals of change. Gradual shifts in timing, movement, or habitat use may be noticed first by people who are present consistently. These observations do not stand on their own as conclusions, but they can help indicate where closer attention or additional monitoring may be useful.
This is where lived experience often intersects with structured observation and research. Programs described in Citizen Science: Helping Wildlife in BC and Data for the Wild show how repeated, place-based observation can support data collection by adding context and continuity.
Where Lived Experience Reaches Its Limits
Lived experience also has limits, and recognizing them is essential.
Because it is rooted in specific places, understanding built in one landscape does not automatically apply elsewhere. Conditions observed in one area may not exist in another, even nearby. Treating local familiarity as broadly representative can lead to incorrect assumptions when context changes.
What people notice also depends on where and when they spend time. Changes that occur outside those windows may go unseen, which is why broader monitoring remains important.
Lived experience helps frame understanding and raises questions, but it does not provide complete answers on its own. Recognizing these boundaries helps ensure it is used appropriately and alongside other forms of knowledge.
Where Lived Experience and Science Meet
Different ways of knowing tend to answer different kinds of questions.
Long-term research helps describe change across larger areas and longer timeframes. Familiarity with a specific place helps explain how those changes show up on the ground. When these perspectives are understood together, they provide a clearer picture than either could alone.
Lived experience often helps identify where questions are emerging. Science provides the tools to explore those questions in a structured way. Each supports the other when their roles are understood.
What Happens When Lived Experience Is Misunderstood
Misunderstandings arise when lived experience is dismissed entirely or asked to do more than it reasonably can.
When it is reduced to opinion, its value is lost. When it is expected to function like formal analysis, its limitations become more apparent. Clarifying what lived experience offers helps reduce friction in wildlife discussions and supports more productive dialogue.
Many common questions about how different perspectives fit together are addressed in the Who Cares BC FAQ.
Decision-Making Close to the Land
Wildlife decisions are often developed at broad scales, but their impacts are experienced locally.
Understanding lived experience helps ground how those decisions are interpreted on the ground, without shifting authority or responsibility. It provides insight into how conditions vary from place to place and how change is experienced in specific landscapes.
Decision-making that remains transparent and structured benefits from recognizing this local context alongside broader research and Indigenous Knowledge.
A Steadier Way Forward
Clarifying what lived experience means helps slow wildlife conversations and create space for understanding. Different ways of knowing each contribute something distinct. Understanding how they work together supports discussions that are more grounded and better connected to the places they affect.
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