Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses how forest protection and rehabilitation initiatives by state and international actors and their attendant infrastructures get highly contested and involve violence in a context where forest-dependent communities claim ancestry to the place

Paper long abstract:

At COP 21 in Paris (2015), OECD member states committed to a minimum of USD 100 billion/year up to 2025 in so-called “climate finance”, to support developing countries in their efforts to combat climate change. However, state-supported climate action projects often result in unintended negative effects upon impacted communities (Magnan et al. 2016). This is captured in the climate adaptation literature as “maladaptation” – without, however, elucidating the processes and mechanisms behind. In order to gain a better understanding of the politics of forest protection and rehabilitation, this paper looks at a case of contested forest protection and rehabilitation from the perspective of socioecological transformation at resource frontiers (Rasmussen and Lund 2018). The Mau Forest in Kenya sustains several rivers such as river Mara that traverses the world-re-known Maasai Mara conservation area. The paper, which is based on six months of empirical research in Kenya in 2019, analyses the positioning of various actors towards the rehabilitation of Mau Forest: International conservation agencies, such as UNEP, who have initiated a frontier of conservation in the early 2000s; Kenyan politicians; the Kenya Forest Services (KFS), a state body, that started an afforestation project in 2011 under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and has implemented for the past years a wave of evictions affecting thousands of irregular settlers in the Mau Forest area; the different forest-adjacent communities, centrally the Ogiek who won a regional court case in 2017 affirming their indigeneity to the Mau Forest area; and international environmental and human rights NGOs.