Abstract
Across Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands, vast rangelands are being transformed into community conservancies – common property arrangements managed for transhumance pastoralism and biodiversity conservation. The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) has spearheaded this transformation, promoting community conservancies as a model that conserves biodiversity while developing resilience, improving livelihoods, and promoting security among diverse pastoralist groups in Kenya. Building on recent critical engagement with the NRT model, this article reframes community conservancies as green grabs. In doing so, it makes two overarching contributions to wider debates. The first contribution complicates stereotypes about ‘grabbers’ and ‘grabbees’ and unsettles crude distinctions between political reactions to green grabs, social phenomena commonly portrayed as enacted from above and reacted to from below. Using the concept of bricolage, we show how actors at multiple scales with multiple identities participate – consciously and unconsciously – in reshaping institutional arrangements for managing communal lands and natural resources to align with conservation. The second contribution reveals how power works through emergent hybrid institutions, producing undesired and unintended outcomes. With this in mind, the article concludes that green grab by bricolage produces contradictory spaces animated by a seemingly adaptive, innovative, and progressive agenda, but constrained by historical patterns of access, accumulation, and domination.
Highlights
Departing from the framing of land grabs as social phenomena enacted from above and reacted to from below (Hall et al 2015), we show how green grabs occur subtly through the refurbishment and rearrangement of institutions governing communal lands and natural resources to align with the ideas and aspirations of Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM)
Building on recent critical engagement with the expansion of community conservancies across Kenya’s ASALs, this article reframes the refurbishment and rearrangement of pastoralist institutions governing communal lands and natural resources to align with the ideas and aspirations of CBNRM as a form of green grab
Our analysis and discussion reveal the subtle ways that green grabs occur through processes of bricolage: the conscious and unconscious reshaping of institutional arrangements for managing communal lands and natural resources by bricoleurs, who make use of whatever resources and tools happen to be at their disposal (Cleaver 2012)
Summary
Across Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs), entire ecosystems are being transformed into community conservancies – spaces where transhumance pastoralism and biodiversity conservation are jointly pursued through. The pursuit of economically viable conservation programmes tends to involve the commodiication and privatisation/marketisation of communal lands and natural resources – processes that institutionalise new forms of exclusion, relationships of authority, and mechanisms for valuing natural resources that contradict the very ideas and aspirations of CBNRM (Songorwa 1999; Alexander and McGregor 2000; Igoe and Croucher 2007; Ojeda 2012; Wright 2017) For such reasons, many CBNRM arrangements bear the hallmark of green grabs: ‘the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends’ (Fairhead et al 2012: 238). After saying more about the case study and methods behind this article, the rest of this article considers how green grab by bricolage ‘creates room for manoeuvre and new possibilities for some people but simultaneously reproduces and reinforces social inequalities for others’ (Cleaver 2012)
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