TY - JOUR

T1 - Green Grab by Bricolage - The Institutional Workings of Community Conservancies in Kenya

AU - Bersaglio, Brock

AU - Cleaver, Frances

PY - 2018/10/1

Y1 - 2018/10/1

N2 - Across Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands, vast rangelands are being transformed into community conservancies - common property arrangements managed for transhumance pastoralism and biodiversity conservation. The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) has spearheaded this transformation, promoting community conservancies as a model that conserves biodiversity while developing resilience, improving livelihoods, and promoting security among diverse pastoralist groups in Kenya. Building on recent critical engagement with the NRT model, this article reframes community conservancies as green grabs. In doing so, it makes two overarching contributions to wider debates. The first contribution complicates stereotypes about 'grabbers' and 'grabbees' and unsettles crude distinctions between political reactions to green grabs, social phenomena commonly portrayed as enacted from above and reacted to from below. Using the concept of bricolage, we show how actors at multiple scales with multiple identities participate - consciously and unconsciously - in reshaping institutional arrangements for managing communal lands and natural resources to align with conservation. The second contribution reveals how power works through emergent hybrid institutions, producing undesired and unintended outcomes. With this in mind, the article concludes that green grab by bricolage produces contradictory spaces animated by a seemingly adaptive, innovative, and progressive agenda, but constrained by historical patterns of access, accumulation, and domination.

AB - Across Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands, vast rangelands are being transformed into community conservancies - common property arrangements managed for transhumance pastoralism and biodiversity conservation. The Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT) has spearheaded this transformation, promoting community conservancies as a model that conserves biodiversity while developing resilience, improving livelihoods, and promoting security among diverse pastoralist groups in Kenya. Building on recent critical engagement with the NRT model, this article reframes community conservancies as green grabs. In doing so, it makes two overarching contributions to wider debates. The first contribution complicates stereotypes about 'grabbers' and 'grabbees' and unsettles crude distinctions between political reactions to green grabs, social phenomena commonly portrayed as enacted from above and reacted to from below. Using the concept of bricolage, we show how actors at multiple scales with multiple identities participate - consciously and unconsciously - in reshaping institutional arrangements for managing communal lands and natural resources to align with conservation. The second contribution reveals how power works through emergent hybrid institutions, producing undesired and unintended outcomes. With this in mind, the article concludes that green grab by bricolage produces contradictory spaces animated by a seemingly adaptive, innovative, and progressive agenda, but constrained by historical patterns of access, accumulation, and domination.

KW - Community-Based Natural Resource Management

KW - critical institutionalism

KW - Green grab

KW - institutional bricolage

KW - Kenya

KW - Laikipia

U2 - 10.4103/cs.cs_16_144

DO - 10.4103/cs.cs_16_144

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85059764491

VL - 16

SP - 467

EP - 480

JO - Conservation and Society

JF - Conservation and Society

SN - 0972-4923

IS - 4

ER -