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Paper short abstract

This paper examines the methodological and epistemological challenges in studying how illegal African sandalwood extraction in northern Kenya interweaves with local governance and value systems.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the illegal extraction of African sandalwood (Osyris lanceolata) in northern Kenya. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with Samburu communities and along the commodity chain, I trace how global value chains generate local extractive regimes, in which state, market, criminal, and community actors renegotiate legal, cultural, and ecological meanings.

At least since the 2000s, African sandalwood connects remote pastoralist communities to the global luxury scent market, shifting local economic boundaries and generating long‑term ecological risks. Under conditions of limited state presence, communities assume gatekeeper roles, locally conferring harvesting rights to smugglers. Smuggling networks intersect with law enforcement through practices of facilitation and selective enforcement, producing a field of blurred roles, porous jurisdictions, and structural mistrust. Community members are routinely solicited by both sides to become informants.

At the same time, sandalwood, locally revered as a "Rainmaker Tree", holds significant ecological and spiritual value. Rising climate pressures intensify both its commodification and the revitalisation of cultural meanings, producing frictious regimes of value.

The paper argues that these dynamics fundamentally shape the conditions of ethnographic knowledge production. Research encounters become stages of strategic performance, often intelligible only retrospectively. By tracing how (il-)legality, economic and ecological value are distributed across sites (rural extraction zones, elder councils, courtrooms, smuggling and processing nodes), the paper reflects on the methodological consequences of researching such fractured fields. Partial access and selective disclosure are not treated as shortcomings, but data through which environmental governance and frontier economies can be explored.