We present a novel approach to the study of Yang-Mills instantons on quaternionic Kähler manifolds, based on an extension of the harmonic space method of constructing instantons on hyperk\"ahler manifolds. Our results establish a bijection between local equivalence classes of instantons on quaternionic Kähler manifolds M and equivalence classes of certain holomorphic maps on an appropriate SL_2(C)-bundle over the Swann bundle of M
