Presentation short abstract

Kenya’s Olkaria geothermal project exposes the uneven geographies of a “just transition.” Through participatory GIS with Maasai groups, we trace green sacrifice zones, where energy sovereignty, pollution, and displacement entangle in the name of decarbonization.

Presentation long abstract

The Olkaria geothermal complex in Kenya is widely celebrated as a flagship of green development and a symbol of Africa’s renewable energy future. Yet its expansion exposes the contradictions and uneven geographies embedded within the discourse of a “just transition.” In the pursuit of decarbonization, geothermal infrastructures have redrawn the socio-material landscapes of land, water, and belonging, reconfiguring who gains and who loses within the green sacrifice zones.

Adopting a critical and participatory GIS (PPGIS) framework grounded in feminist epistemologies, this study engages communities as co-producers of spatial knowledge rather than as data sources.

Through GPS-guided transects, participatory mapping, geo-questionnaires, and oral cartographies, we work with Maasai elders, women, youth, and neighboring ethnic groups. Together, we trace how geothermal expansion reshapes access to land, water, livelihoods, and grazing routes. We also map the spatial concentrations of harm and benefit, where pollution, health risks, and displacement collide with the ambitions of national energy sovereignty, urban tariffs, and employment.

These collaboratively produced counter-maps, layered with satellite imagery and concession data, unsettle the assumed equity and progressiveness of decarbonizing with geothermal. They reveal “green sacrifice zones” not as objective polygons but as dynamic, lived geographies charged with memory, emotion, and struggle. By integrating embodied experience and community memory into spatial analysis, this work gestures toward a pluriverse of spatialities, a terrain where technocratic cartographies of geothermal expansion intersect with the relational micro-geographies of Massai and Maa-speakers.