Paper short abstract:

The comparative analysis of two case studies on the governance of rangelands in Southern Kenya underscores how the operationalization of the law expected to recognize community land rights has been instrumentalized to serve international and national investments, and elites' political strategies.

Paper long abstract:

Policy debates on land tenure in Africa have been driven by international paradigms and standards on economic development, discussing the trade-off between productivity and sustainability. A dichotomist vision has often opposed the forces urging the privatisation of both the land and the natural resources, against the impelling push towards preserving the commons. In Kenya, the Community Land Act (CLA), promulgated in 2016 appeared to have marked a turning point by settling the debate on the urgent need of preserving the livelihood practices that ensure sustainable land uses, such as pastoralism in drylands, but also shielding communities from dispossession, and the pauperization resulting from land commoditization and marketization.

Yet, few years after the enactment of the law, it has become evident that its operationalization has rather been instrumentalized to favour international and national capitals and investments, as well as to serve the strategies of political and economic elites pursuing territorial control. The comparative analysis of two case studies on the governance of rangelands in Southern Kenya (Kajiado --Kuku location-- and Narok --Loita location) emphasises the politics of implementing the CLA. It underscores the national and local dynamics that have led and still underpins negotiated processes of on-going land subdivision. It argues that the failure of securing collective or group-based land rights will hinder the capacity of communities to sustain semi-nomadic pastoralism and tackle extended drought, in a context of ideologization of the private property model, pressing conservation-based and/or intensive farming-orianted investments, dramatic ecological changes, transgenerational epistemological transformations and politicians’ neo-patrimonial strategies.