Multiple domesticities: A cross-country analysis on One Health domesticity across selected localities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire

This study explores the concept of the domestic within the One Health approach by examining how human-animal-environment relations shape health and survival in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire during the rainy and dry seasons of 2022-2023, we explore how the domestic is continually produced through multispecies relationality of care, ecology, and biopolitics. Instead of treating the household as a fixed surveillance unit, we trace how domesticity extends into abattoirs, courtyards, and neighbourhoods — sites where feeding, healing, killing, and cohabiting connect human and non-human lives under ecological change, economic precarity, and health surveillance. These entanglements reveal how caring relations, ecological adaptation, and governance intersect in ways that challenge One Health's conventional boundaries between human, animal, and environmental domains. This study demonstrates how health emerges through ongoing relatedness and interdependence, by conceptualising domesticity as a dynamic terrain of multispecies dwelling. This relational perspective attunes One Health to a more inclusive understanding of multispecies well-being among increasing climatic pressures.