Land-use and livelihood patterns among (post-) pastoralist peoples in the East African drylands have changed profoundly in recent decades. Based on ethnographic data from East Pokot, in and around Kenya’s Baringo County, I explore how ongoing patterns of socio-economic change intersect with a recent wave of large-scale investments in these pastoral hinterlands.
I employ the notion of “frontiers” to explore different processes of spatial expansion, including dryland farming and sedentarization among pastoralist communities on the one hand, and a current wave of infrastructure investments into marginal rangelands on the other hand. Both processes increasingly converge, and mutually reinforce each other, in ways that lead to profound competition for and revaluation of land.
The drivers of these frontier processes come from different angles: population pressure, socio-cultural transformations, and changing environmental conditions are among the factors that drive livelihood changes in local communities, while intensified exploitation of the dryland resources is driven by Kenya’s Vision 2030, global policies, and international investors. These processes converge in an “institutional vacuum”, characteristic of many frontier settings, where these different processes raise expectations about the future benefits of land ownership regimes within (post-) pastoralist communities. The fact that the Kenyan government has no monopoly on violence in this area is a crucial factor in negotiating these emerging and often competing claims for land.