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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses conservation as a political leverage for local stakeholders in the negotiation of new futures. It shows that the struggle of the Lembus community for forest conservation in Baringo, Kenya, motivates and legitimizes their demand for rights and voice in forest management.

Paper long abstract:

“The Lembus Forest is being mismanaged because the people brought from outside (for political reasons) do not care about the trees, the soil erosion, the water sources, the medicinal trees, etc.” These words were written by the Lembus Council of Elders to the Kenya Ministry of Environment and Forestry in March 2018 to request a more sustainable and inclusive management of their ancestral forests. This contribution examines conservation as a way for local stakeholders to negotiate the future of the forest and of their own community. The forest that the Lembus people (a Kalenjin subgroup) still call the “Lembus Forest” was put under governmental management and used for commercial timber exploitation from the 1910s, under the colonial regime in Kenya. Although local forest dwellers, of which mainly Lembus people, were recognized rights to live there, after Kenya’s independence, they were relocated in areas freed from the forest land, while the forests remained in governmental hands. In 2019, members of the Lembus community, under the lead of the Lembus Council of Elders, were contesting a governmental forest management which, they argued, focused on exploitation and neglected the conservation of the local forests. Claiming their ancestral ownership and their cultural link to the forest, they mobilized conservationist arguments to request a say in forest management and benefits from forest utilization. This contribution highlights the (re-)appropriation of conservation by Lembus stakeholders as a political leverage to counter the historical injustice of colonial and postcolonial forest management, and to negotiate new futures.