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Paper short abstract

This talk explores participatory animal health surveillance in pastoralist and conservation landscapes in central Kenya. Drawing on early fieldwork, I examine how livestock keepers, conservancies, and state actors perceive opportunities and barriers to community-based disease reporting.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines participatory surveillance of animal disease as both a technical proposal and a political project, situated in pastoralist and conservation landscapes in Laikipia County, Kenya. Drawing on exploratory fieldwork, including household surveys and conversations with pastoralists, livestock managers, and conservation actors, as well as more traditional epidemiological research, I consider how different stakeholders imagine participation in animal health surveillance systems. Preliminary findings suggest that while many livestock keepers express willingness to report unusual illness events, participation is often contingent upon expectations of reciprocity, including access to veterinary services, timely information, and trust in the institutions receiving the data.

Situating these perspectives within the broader governance landscape of wildlife conservation, state veterinary authority, and development interventions, the paper asks where participatory epidemiology might meaningfully reshape disease surveillance and where it may reproduce existing asymmetries of expertise and responsibility. Rather than treating participation as a purely technical fix for gaps in surveillance coverage, I argue that participatory systems must be understood as negotiated infrastructures embedded in social, ecological, and political relations. Examining the promises and limits of participatory surveillance in pastoralist Kenya, the paper reflects on how collaborative approaches to animal health monitoring might be designed in ways that acknowledge local knowledge, multispecies entanglements, and the uneven distribution of responsibility for managing emerging disease risks.