Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how the persistence of onto-ethical norms in the Mau landscape, Kenya, constitutes a politics of endurance that unsettles imposed technocratic frameworks. These dynamics position the Mau as a site of de facto pluriversal governance, sustaining diverse relations with the forest.

Presentation long abstract

Drawing on walking interviews and conversations with landscape actors, this paper examines how conflicting ontologies—technocratic and affective belonging—are negotiated and inhabited around Kenya’s South-Western Mau Reserve. Approaches to environmental protection here have been shaped by overlapping colonial and post-independence legacies. Entanglements with telecoupled tea production continue to dominate, and consolidation towards fortress-style conservation effaces lived histories of land appropriation while challenging local claims to forest ownership and cultural identity. The active assertion of colonial logics defines the conditions of legibility through which only certain relations are considered legitimate; however, in these rural contexts, where state authority remains limited and is routinely circumvented, everyday practices involving the forest—such as collecting firewood, crafting materials, or medicine, going to hunt, or pray—persist amid changing regulations and ecologies. Seemingly rival ontologies are present, neither entirely separate nor subsumed, intersecting in encounters that generate novel accommodations capable of bridging institutional and lived orders. A latent and obscured form of local governance therefore surfaces, grounded in a locally constructed moral gradient and enacted through onto-ethical norms that approach the forest as a living presence, provider, and refuge. I interpret this as relational endurance: a subtle politics in which illegality is not ontologically binding. In this context, interactions between worlds unfold through deeply embedded and habitual engagements that remain adjacent to state control. These dynamics position the Mau as a site of de facto pluriversal governance which unsettles attempts to standardise control, sustaining diverse understandings of what constitutes relations of care, use, and meaning with the forest.