Land-use change, territorial restructuring, and economies of anticipation in dryland Kenya

ABSTRACT

Land-use patterns in the Eastern African drylands have changed greatly in recent decades. Ethnographic data from East Pokot, in Kenya’s Baringo area, illustrate some of the major dynamics of change and point to relevant drivers. While the pastoral Pokot people managed an open, unfragmented rangeland until the 1990s, wildlife conservation, sedentarization, and land-use intensification, together with increasing contestation of borderlands, have led to a profound fragmentation and contraction of the commons, and a fundamental territorial restructuring. These dynamics are driven by economies of anticipation, fuelled by expectations of future developments such as large-scale infrastructural expansion and changing institutional frameworks, and entail massive conflicts around access to and control over land. While much attention has been paid to the role of external actors in land appropriation in East Africa, this paper directs attention to endogenous agency and compliancy in territorial restructuring.

KEYWORDS:

• Pastoralism
• land-use change
• future-making
• infrastructures
• socio-spatial relations
• conflict

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Elizabeth Watson, Jason Mosley, and Ben Cousins for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper, and to two anonymous reviewers. For editorial assistance, I thank Bebero Lehmann.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Clemens Greiner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6771-373X

Notes

1. See Hennings, African Mornings; Peristiany, “Pokot Sanctions and Structure”; Schneider, Pakot Resistance to Change; Bollig, Die Krieger der gelben Gewehre; and Bollig, Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment.

2. See Lesorogol, Contesting the Commons; Schlee, Territorializing Ethnicity; Catley, Lind, and Scoones, Pastoralism and Development in Africa; Abbink et al., Lands of the Future; Korf, Hagmann, and Emmenegger, “Re-spacing African Drylands.”

3. Korf, Hagmann, and Emmenegger, “Re-spacing African Drylands,” 17.

4. The usage of the term post-pastoralism is reminiscent of the notion of post-foraging used in recent studies on changing lifestyles in many contemporary hunter-gatherer groups, e.g. in Takada, “Narratives on San Ethnicity.”

5. See Bollig, Greiner, and Österle, “Inscribing Identity and Agency on the Landscape.”

6. See McPeak, Little, and Doss, Risk and Social Change in an African Rural Economy; Catley, Lind, and Scoones, Pastoralism and Development in Africa.

7. See Greiner, “Unexpected Consequences”; Weng et al., “Mineral Industries, Growth Corridors and Agricultural Development in Africa”; Muchui, Six New Wildlife Conservancies.

8. See RoK, Republic of Kenya; Nyanjom, “Remarginalising Kenyan Pastoralists.”

9. See Greiner, “Guns, Land and Votes”; Schrepfer and Caterina, On the Margin; Nyaoro, Schade, and Schmidt, Assessing the Evidence.

10. Cf. Cross, The Economy of Anticipation. See also Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact. Beckert describes these dynamics as the “politics of expectations,” see Beckert, Imagined Futures, 11.

11. Cf. Watson, “A ‘Hardening of Lines’.”

12. Gupta and Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’,” 7.

13. See Painter, “Rethinking Territory.”

14. Jessop, Brenner, and Jones, “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations,” 393.

15. Sack, Human Territoriality, 56.

16. Raffestin, “Space, Territory, and Territoriality,” 126.

17. Ibid.

18. See Painter, “Rethinking Territory,” 1093.

19. Cf. Murphy “Entente Territorial.”

20. See Malkki, “National Geographic.”

21. See Bollig, Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment.

22. Reckers, Nomadic Pastoralists in Kenya, 10.

23. The political-administrative situation started to change in 2016; see Greiner, “Pastoralism and Land Use Change in Kenya.”

24. Bollig and Österle, “Changing Communal Land Tenure,” 306.

25. Fratkin, “Seeking Alternative Livelihoods in Pastoralist Areas,” 197.

26. Little, Reflections on the Future of Pastoralism, 245.

27. See KNBS, The 2009 Kenya Population and Housing Census.

28. The annual growth rates from 1999 to 2009 correspond to a growth of 7.4%, which does not reflect a natural growth rate. I do not have a solid explanation for this. It remains beyond doubt, however, that growth rates are extremely high, as the census figures from 1979 and 1989 already suggest. I am indebted to Hartmut Lang for assisting me with these population figures.

29. See Bollig, Greiner, and Österle, “Inscribing Identity and Agency on the Landscape”; Greiner and Mwaka, “Agricultural Change at the Margins.”

30. See Obermaier, Spatio-temporal Assessment of Maize Cultivation in East Pokot.

31. See Bollig, Die Krieger der gelben Gewehre; Bollig, Risk Management in a Hazardous Environment.

32. See Greiner, “Pastoralism and Land Tenure Change in Kenya.”

33. See Greiner, Alvarez, and Becker, “From Cattle to Corn,” Greiner and Mwaka, “Agricultural Change at the Margins.”

34. See Obermaier, Spatio-temporal Assessment of Maize Cultivation in East Pokot.

35. Peters, “Challenges in Land Tenure and Land Reform in Africa,” 1320.

36. See Greiner, “Pastoralism and Land Tenure Change in Kenya.”

37. The toponyms refer to the settlements with declining suitability for rain-fed crop cultivation, from Churo (c. 1800 m.a.s.l.) to Tangulbei (c. 1250 m.a.s.l.) and Chepkalacha (c. 1050 m.a.s.l.). This also indicates the spatio-temporal extension of privatization and concomitant land-conflicts, i.e. from the highlands towards the lowlands.

38. Interview, Churo, 9 March 2011.

39. See Greiner, “Unexpected Consequences.”

40. www.nrt-kenya.org/whatis-nrt/.

41. See Bollig and Österle, “Changing Communal Land Tenure.”

42. See Greiner, “Unexpected Consequences.”

43. Interview, Komolion, 19 July 2011.

44. See Galaty, “The Maasai Group-Ranch.”

45. See Ensminger, Making a Market.

46. Interview with Rafael Lowei, Kaptuya, 20 July 2011.

47. Interview with representative of the Geothermal Development Cooperation, 12 September 2011.

48. See Mariita, “The Impact of Large-Scale Renewable Energy Development”; Schade, Kenya Case Study Report.

49. A Harambee (Kiswahili) is a fundraising function, often used for political mobilization.

50. Geothermal Development Company, a state-owned Kenyan company created in 2006 to promote the exploitation of the country’s geothermal energy sources.

51. Interview, Churo, 30 April 2011.

52. Personal communication, Hauke-Peter Vehrs, 10 November 2015.

53. See UNOCHA, Kenya.

54. See Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson, “Nomadic Pastoralism.”

55. See Mkutu, Guns & Governance in the Rift Valley.

56. Anderson and Lochery, “Violence and Exodus in Kenya’s Rift Valley,” 339.

57. See Ndanyi, “Baringo Speaker.”

58. See Eaton, “The Business of Peace,” Parts I and II; Greiner, “Guns, Land and Votes.”

59. See Mathenge, Devolution and Minerals; Ndotono, “Kenya.”

60. Anderson and Lochery, “Violence and Exodus in Kenya’s Rift Valley,” 339.

61. Little, The Elusive Granary, 135.

62. See Bollig and Österle, “Changing Communal Land Tenure.”

63. See Schlee, “Territorializing Ethnicity.”

64. See Bollig, Greiner, and Österle, “Inscribing Identity and Agency on the Landscape.”

65. See Schlee, “Territorializing Ethnicity.”

66. Ibid., 8.

67. See Anderson, “Majimboism”; Anderson and Lochery, “Violence and Exodus in Kenya’s Rift Valley.”

68. See Mathenge, Devolution and Minerals; Hatcher, Kenya Oil Deposits.

69. See Obare, Pokot Residents Applaud New Border Boundaries; Greiner, “Guns, Land and Votes.”

70. Memorandum presented by East Pokot leaders, professional groups, and community council of elders to Hon. Andrew N. Ligale EBS, the chairman of the Interim Independent Boundary Review Commission in 2010 (copy of the report held by the author).

71. See Greiner, “Guns, Land and Votes.”

72. Interview, Tangulbei, 26 March 2015.

73. See Straight, “Making Sense of Violence.”

74. Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact, 298.

75. Ibid.

76. Yussuf Losute, Nakuru, 12 September 2011.

77. See Greiner and Mwaka, “Agricultural Change at the Margins.”

78. Elliott, “Planning”; Cormack “Heritage”; Kochore “Road.”

79. See Greiner, “Pastoralism and Land Tenure Change in Kenya.”

80. Ruben Cherindis, Churo, 9 April 2011.

81. A similar observation is made by Elliott, “Planning.”

82. See Herskovits, “The Cattle Complex in East Africa”; Schneider, Pakot Resistance to Change.

83. See Waller, “Ecology, Migration, and Expansion in East Africa.”

84. See Hogg, “The New Pastoralism”; Turton, “The Meaning of Place in a World of Movement”; Galaty, “Land Grabbing in the Eastern African Rangelands”; Abbink et al., Lands of the Future.

85. Holtzman, “In a Cup of Tea,” 138.

Additional information

Funding

This research was embedded in the interdisciplinary research unit ‘Resilience, Collapse and Reorganization in Social-Ecological Systems of East- and South Africa’s Savannahs’ (RCR), funded by the German Research Foundation.