Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how new greening frontiers emerge when accelerated green investments meet local mobility, land claims, and fragmented authority in Northern Kenya. Here, green logics generate unruliness and reshape resource politics, revealing new spaces of contested authority and justice.

Presentation long abstract

Global climate and biodiversity crises have generated powerful anticipatory narratives portraying nature, land, and time as rapidly vanishing. These global green scarcity imaginaries drive accelerated conservation and renewable energy investments into local scales across African drylands that are now revalued as essential for planetary futures. For this reason, we see conservation and renewable energy not as separate domains but as interconnected elements of a moral project of greening that produces forms of territorialization, enclosure, and symbolic legitimacy for expanding green investments.

Yet, upon implementation in Northern Kenya’s drylands, these greening efforts, whether solar farms, expanding rhino sanctuaries, or carbon projects, encounter unruly socio-political landscapes as local actors reinterpret, resist, or appropriate these agendas. This paper examines how greening frontiers emerge when global crisis-driven anticipation meets local histories of mobility, land claims, and fragmented authority. These frontiers, imagined as empty, governable, or environmentally necessary, prove anything but: pastoralist livelihoods, customary tenure, elite patronage networks, and militarized state–conservancy entanglements complicate the neat logic of green development.

Rather than yielding smooth transitions, accelerated green interventions generate green conflicts that materialize as forms of slow and cumulative tension and violence. Such friction is tied to greening projects themselves along with whoever is driving the agenda and the vested interests involved.

By tracing the collision between global green agendas and local scale unruliness, the paper argues that the future-oriented logics of the green transition reshape resource politics and reveal new spaces where authority and justice are reimagined and contested within rapidly changing dryland frontiers.