Paper short abstract:

I investigate how community conservancies in northern Kenya engage in a variety of security practices beyond conservation, or ‘green security’, by examining how two types of ranger practices establish conservancies as a central security force by complementing and substituting Kenya’s police.

Paper long abstract:

Multiple incompatible ideas shape the contentious debate on how to conserve nature in and for the future. Among those, people-centred conservation approaches are long engaged as the future of conservation. These approaches are usually contrasted to and were developed to counteract social injustices produced by coercive fortress-style conservation. This paper investigates how community conservancies in northern Kenya nevertheless engage in a variety of militarised security practices beyond conservation, which I call ‘green security’. I explain why, although community-based conservation might seem incompatible with ‘green militarisation’ at first sight, it perpetuates militarised ‘green security’ logics. I do so by examining how two types of ranger green security practices establish conservancies as a central security force by complementing and substituting Kenya’s security sector. The article draws on data from two fieldwork trips in Samburu in 2020 and 2022 and a document analysis. The green security practices result in a distinct shift of power relations and ‘statisation’ in the region because conservancies reorganise state-socio-ecological orders and produce the state as ‘an effect’. The paper, finally, argues that the future of conservation, despite the unresolved debates, remains one underpinned by green security logics, particularly in historical marginalised areas with limited state presence.