Presentation short abstract

This paper presents a critical analysis of how fishing communities at Lake Turkana are struggling in a shifting landscape where climate change, state conservation, and market pressures converge. We show how Lake Turkana while being a World Heritage site is also a site of everyday struggle

Presentation long abstract

On Lake Turkana, fishermen describe their work as “a daily war,” caught precariously between Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) rangers, the highest water levels in two decades, and increasing human-crocodile conflict. This paper offers a critical political ecology analysis of how fishing communities struggle in a shifting landscape where climate change, state conservation, and market pressures converge. Years of climate-induced droughts have undermined pastoral livelihoods, pushing people toward the fishing villages, intensifying competition for declining fish stocks. Commercialization has accelerated, with Congolese traders now purchasing fish fry at an unsustainable rate for industrial processing abroad. Rising water levels further alter lake ecology and familiar fishing grounds, driving crocodiles closer to human settlements. These pressures unfold alongside the Kenyan state’s efforts to defend its green image by protecting Lake Turkana’s UNESCO World Heritage status. The endangered status of Lake Turkana National Park has prompted intensified monitoring and enforcement, resulting in increasingly violent confrontations between KWS and fishing communities. Although UNESCO promotes an image of peaceful and collaborative heritage protection, the reality on Lake Turkana is one of fear, harassment, coercion, and violence. By situating fishermen at the center of these intersecting dynamics, the paper shows how they navigate conflict, environmental change, and state violence. It also demonstrates how global conservation agendas, climate change, and market extraction intersect to produce everyday violence. Finally, it shows how communities navigate these overlapping forms of precarity while sustaining livelihoods on a lake that is both a World Heritage site and a site of everyday struggle.