Abstract
State-led development visions and the accompanying large-scale investments at the geographical margins of Kenya rest on the potential of public–private partnerships to fast-tract sustainable development through accelerated investments. Yet, the conceptualisation, planning and implementation of these visions often deploy a depoliticising development discourse that reinforces and expands long-standing misconceptions about the margins primarily directed at pastoral livelihoods and related communal land tenure. This paper illustrates how the implementation of a wind energy project employs the corporate strategies of depoliticising both land claims and development interventions. In Northern Kenya, private sector participation in large-scale wind energy infrastructure has created a complex development apparatus in which players are empowered to undertake the accelerated investments required to shape the delivery of the Kenya Vision 2030 in the region. An analysis of corporate actors’ strategies in the implementation of the contested wind farm presents a depoliticised framing of “low-cost green energy”, representations of pastoral land tenure and corporate social responsibility strategies through which dispossession is justified and legitimised. This case underscores the extent to which corporate counterresistance is shaped by the reproduction of a historical depoliticised discourse about pastoralism and communal tenure and challenges the traditional narrative of government hegemony against local resistance to large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs).
Highlights
Recent scholarship has produced a wide range of insightful analyses on the trajectories and dynamics of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and related grassroots mobilisation against their dispossessing potential
The analysis of the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project (LTWP) revealed that there is more to the recent discourse on the development of wind power in Northern Kenya than the imperative of generating more energy at lower cost to meet the increased demand in the realisation of Kenya Vision 2030
Accompanying practices, such as placing the responsibility for the planning and operation of LSLA programs into the hands of private sector actors that attempt to absolve state and local institutions from their responsibility and accountability projects, legitimises the depoliticisation of development programs to secure the extraction of value from natural resources by the private sector
Summary
Recent scholarship has produced a wide range of insightful analyses on the trajectories and dynamics of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and related grassroots mobilisation against their dispossessing potential. Drawing from the case study of a wind power development project in Northern Kenya, the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project (LTWP), this contribution critically analyses the historical and contemporary technical discourse around the “visions of viability” [7] of pastoralism enacted through colonial and postcolonial policy and planning and their practical and political consequences for LSLA of community land. The LTWP fits a wider and well documented pattern of the depoliticisation of development [4] and the extension of state control through a specific knowledge structure that presents pastoralism as unviable and legitimises large-scale investments as the ideal It demonstrates how, as argued by Cousins and Scoones [7], by creating technical discourse around visions of economic viability, large-scale investments become enacted through policy and planning without interrogation. We conclude with a discussion on the relevance of depoliticisation on commons dispossession and how such contested appropriation of commons constitutes “resilience grabbing”, with deleterious impacts on commons reliance on CPRs
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