Water governance, institutions and conflicts in the Maasai Rangelands

Water scarcity in Narok county, Kenya may be attributed to demographic pressures, land-use changes, environmental degradation and the effects of climate change. This article combines methodologies from history and political science to investigate how local communities cope with water scarcity. In so doing, we consider how institutions, both indigenous and modern, mitigate conflict over access to and control of water sources. Cases are presented from sites of irrigation and development projects or plans. We find that climate change has little to do with water conflicts in Narok, but that more important factors are privatisation and commoditisation of formerly common-pool resources, and challenges and failures in modern water governance in mediating between Maasai (pastoralist) and non-Maasai (agriculturalist) groups. Indigenous governance institutions still have a place in conflict resolution and environmental protection

Large Infrastructure Projects and Cascading Land Grabs

From around the beginning of the current millennium, East Africa has been experiencing a wave of large-scale infrastructure expansion. Moreover, in anticipation of the new and improved market linkages that major infrastructure projects promise to bring, a rush to grab land alongside new and recently upgraded transport infrastructure routes is taking place. There is a growing body of research that documents the increasing prevalence of land grabs for infrastructure development. However, so far, less attention has been paid to other forms of land grab that inevitably follow in the wake of new infrastructure development as land alongside new and upgraded infrastructure routes becomes more valuable and desirable. In this chapter, we show how an ongoing transport infrastructure boom in northern Kenya is resulting in a wider cascade of land grabs. Various actors – including government agencies, foreign and domestic investors, and national and local elites – are acquiring land alongside upgraded infrastructure routes while existing rural land users are attempting to secure their access to land and ward off potential land grabbers. Ultimately, we argue that the frenzy of interest in land alongside newly upgraded transport routes drives a cascade of land tenure and use change, multiplying the effects that new infrastructure projects have on land

Future visions, present conflicts: the ethnicized politics of anticipation surrounding an infrastructure corridor in northern Kenya

This work analyses the politics of anticipation and ensuing fears, tensions and conflicts in relation to Kenya's Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor which is to pass through several previously marginalized counties in the north of the country. Isiolo county, in the centre of Kenya is home to several different ethnic groups of whom some are perceived to be better informed about LAPSSET than others, or have certain advantages in terms of claims to indigeneity, ethno-political dominance, land tenure security or access to markets, which help them to position themselves accordingly. This anticipatory positioning - actions people take in anticipation of the future - is raising fears and heightening the claiming of land and ethnic boundary-making, leading to heightened tensions and exacerbating existing conflicts of which three specific cases are considered. We show how ethno-political divides on a national and regional level become effective at the local and county level, but at the same time, how the positioning of actors in anticipation of future investments impacts on ethnic boundary-making, as division lines are re-enacted and redrawn