Abstract
Smallholder settlement schemes have played a prominent role in Kenya's contested history of state-building, land politics, and electoral mobilization. This paper presents the first georeferenced dataset documenting scheme location, boundaries, and attributes of Kenya's 533 official settlement schemes, as well as the first systematic data on scheme creation since 1980. The data show that almost half of all government schemes were created after 1980, as official rural development rationales for state-sponsored settlement gave way to more explicitly welfarist and electoralist objectives. Even so, logics of state territorialization to fix ethnicized, partisan constituencies to state-defined territorial units pervade the history of scheme creation over the entire 1962–2016 period, as theorized in classic political geography works on state territorialization. While these “geopolitics” of regime construction are fueled by patronage politics, they also sustain practices of land allocation that affirm the moral and political legitimacy of grievance-backed claims for land. This fuels on-going contestation around political representation and acute, if socially-fragmented, demands for state-recognition of land rights. Our findings are consistent with recent political geography and interdisciplinary work on rural peoples' demands for state recognition of land rights and access to natural resources. Kenya's history of settlement scheme creation shows that even in the country's core agricultural districts, where the reach of formal state authority is undisputed, the territorial politics of power-consolidation and resource allocation continues to be shaped by social demands and pressures from below.
Highlights
Land politics looms large in the dynamics of state formation, eco nomic development, and electoral politics in African countries; nowhere is this more true than in Kenya
We present the two new datasets that are the basis of the analysis, map the settlement schemes, and situate the history of scheme creation in a broad periodization of Kenya’s postcolonial political trajectory
We show that while there have been stark changes in the Kenyan government’s economic and political rationales for settlement scheme creation over time, the main tenets of our territoriality-focused argument hold for the entire 1962–2016 period
Summary
Land politics looms large in the dynamics of state formation, eco nomic development, and electoral politics in African countries; nowhere is this more true than in Kenya. Territorial politics as a state-making practice, as theorized by Vandergeest and Peluso (1995), for example, involves subdividing ter ritory at different political scales according to rules of resource access, assigning rights to land within particular jurisdictions and bounded areas as a means of developing political relations between central au thorities and settler populations, and accentuating the territorial defi nition of social groups.. Territorial politics as a state-making practice, as theorized by Vandergeest and Peluso (1995), for example, involves subdividing ter ritory at different political scales according to rules of resource access, assigning rights to land within particular jurisdictions and bounded areas as a means of developing political relations between central au thorities and settler populations, and accentuating the territorial defi nition of social groups.3 These are prominent features of the Kenyan case. The conclusion draws parallels to settlement scheme policies employed in recent decades in other African countries, underscoring the fact that the fraught nexus between land politics and contested strategies of state territorialization is neither unique to Kenya nor a thing of the past
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