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Contribution short abstract:

In western Kenya, the Catholic Church promotes commoning to combat environmental degradation, inviting farmers to care for the land as a ‘common home’. This requires intertwined processes of individual and collective self-cultivation, with hope and care creating a virtuous but fragile circle.

Contribution long abstract:

In western Kenya, climate change and environmental degradation are creating increasingly harsh conditions for smallholder farmers. To get by, many farmers have turned to extractive practices such as sand mining and charcoal burning, which further exacerbate the environmental crisis they are trying to escape. In the midst of this challenge, the Catholic Church – to which most farmers belong – has emerged as a key advocate for environmental restoration, calling on farmers to see the environment as their ‘common home’, worthy of care and stewardship, rather than simply a resource for personal exploitation. Drawing on fieldwork with farmers who have responded to the church’s call, I show that the church’s vision of commoning depends on intertwined processes of individual and collective self-cultivation. Cultivating themselves as hopeful subjects enables farmers to resist the lure of environmentally destructive practices and inspires acts of love towards human and more-than-human others. These acts of love form the basis of a community of mutual care, which in turn is essential for sustaining hope within the self. I argue that this intertwining of individual and collective self-cultivation is a defining feature of commoning projects, and represents both a strength and a vulnerability: while the intertwining creates a virtuous circle, failures at either level put the project at risk.