Community-Based Wildlife Conservation on Pastoral Lands in Kenya: A New Logic of Production with Implications for the Future of Pastoralism

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Community-based wildlife conservation has been identified as a potentially successful approach to meet the needs of wildlife and the interests of local communities living among wildlife, national governments, and the global community interested in stemming the extinction crisis facing the planet. There is a significant literature critiquing the neoliberal approach to community-based conservation arguing that it has not been successful in meeting conservation goals or community goals. While in agreement with many of the critiques and the general calls for a more equitable direction that respects and draws on local and indigenous value systems, we focus on some of the implications of community-based conservation for pastoralism in Samburu County, Kenya. We employed an ethnographic approach, integrating informal and in-depth interviews, a random sample survey of 300 households, participant observation, and experimental economics games. Our findings show that the establishment of core areas, buffer zones, and grazing strategies that depart radically from previous practices reduced pastoralists’ access to critical rangeland resources and forced them to find pastures elsewhere. Thus, while community-based conservation purports to encourage landscape-level land management and coordination, in practice, it contributes to land fragmentation. Our results also explain why community-based conservation persists despite the costs for pastoralists.