When Community Falls Apart. Conservation Aid as an Instrument of Land Fragmentation and Control in the Rangelands of Kenya

Abstract (English)

Conservation aid is understood here as the financing flow originating from bilateral or multilateral donors and multinationals that respectevily feeds projects advancing biodiversity conservation and buy carbon credits stemming from these projects. The conservation sector in Kenya is highly reliant on aid to ensure its financial sustainability, even though tourism is a driving industry that can achieve high targets of income (Kalvelage et al. 2021, Cavanagh et al. 2020). While pastoralists are demonised by conservation discourse, or only cunningly commended, livelihood stressors are aggravated by two key phenomena, which are electoral politics and the expansion of conservation enterprises (Fox 2018). The actors this paper focuses on straddle between these two, and are able to do so by recruiting support and building legitimacy in the framework of so-called community-based, participatory aid projects, which are instrumentally geared towards ‘hiding disconnects’, i.e., the tensions, contradictions and paradox that are inherent to the objectives and means of the projects vis-à-vis the power dynamics actually observed on the ground (Mulder 2023). Two case studies located in adjacent areas of Kajiado South (in the Southern Kenyan rangelands) are brought to the fore to expose the nebulous intrigue of conservation aid and land tenure change, by reflecting on the notion of community so much intertwined in the confusion of meanings and purposes brought about by conservation projects, and vis-à-vis their actual effects. Both cases are examples of the spread of misinformation by the group ranch officials, aid actors, local leaders and politicians to prevent the implementation of the Community Land Act (CLA) of 2016, which is a law that was meant to democratise the registration process of communal lands, as well as the land institutions managing already registered community property. They demonstrate that conservation aid’s actors, community leaders and political players pursue the conservation enterprise to entrench political and territorial control, furthering land fragmentation, undermining communities’ reciprocity and indeed subverting the initial goals and rationale of the CLA, which was the democratization of land and natural resources governance systems. The politics of non-implementation of the CLA is analysed against the background of actors’ strategies to pursue territorial and political control, and to capture the rent of conservation aid. I document and analyse the doings of networks of powerful actors conveying particular interpretations of what the community should be, straddling between the imagined conservationist community and incitation to political tribalism in order to favour international and national capitals, and serve the strategies of political and economic elites seeking to exert control and self-enrichment.