Reforming land at the resource frontier in the face of green economy expansion: Changing property regimes in East African drylands

Climate change and biodiversity loss are increasingly presented as an interconnected environmental crisis in need of a global scaling up investments for its mitigation.

While the urgency is based on ecological evidence and receives state, corporate and civil society support, the rolling out of green investments at the local level can be highly problematic.

Green initiatives tend to be implemented in economically and politically marginalized regions, and reproduce existing social and environmental injustices through dynamics of dispossession.

The proposed project’s purpose is to provide novel insights into emerging conflict dynamics over land-based resources in the wake of green investments in the East African drylands.

Its specific aim is to study how multiple stakeholders engage in conflicts that emerge at the intersection of green energy investments and conservation efforts on one hand, and pastoralist community’s control over communal land resources through ongoing land reform policies that aim to provide tenure-security for local communities on the other.

This will be achieved through a multi-site ethnography in two counties in northern Kenya, with data being collected through a strategic combination of questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups, supported by document analysis.

The results are expected to produce advice and identify lessons for wider East African drylands, which share similar challenges to secure community land tenure in the face of green investments.