Land-use change, territorial restructuring, and economies of anticipation in dryland Kenya

Abstract

Land-use patterns in the Eastern African drylands have changed greatly in recent decades. Ethnographic data from East Pokot, in Kenya’s Baringo area, illustrate some of the major dynamics of change and point to relevant drivers. While the pastoral Pokot people managed an open, unfragmented rangeland until the 1990s, wildlife conservation, sedentarization, and land-use intensification, together with increasing contestation of borderlands, have led to a profound fragmentation and contraction of the commons, and a fundamental territorial restructuring. These dynamics are driven by economies of anticipation, fuelled by expectations of future developments such as large-scale infrastructural expansion and changing institutional frameworks, and entail massive conflicts around access to and control over land. While much attention has been paid to the role of external actors in land appropriation in East Africa, this paper directs attention to endogenous agency and compliancy in territorial restructuring.