Africa’s largest wind farm and the largest single private investment in Kenya’s history, the Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) project, located in Marsabit County, is expected to begin generating electricity later this year. The development has come at a time of, and is connected with, regional devolution of political power and capital in Kenya, which is influencing the dynamics of power and power seeking in the area.
This presentation will analyse the changing dynamics of relationships between northern Kenyan communities (including, Samburu, Turkana and Rendile pastoralists who have grazed livestock in the region for generations), the state and the LTWP investment company. Central to the discussion are people’s understandings, portrayals and contestations regarding lineage, ethnicity, belonging, custodianship and violence, in light of politics, patronage networks and/or perceptions of rights to benefit from the wind power investment. The presentation will show how such portrayals and contestations over identities and belonging are embedded within cosmological aspects of people’s lives. This will provide unique insight on how views of LTWP vary greatly at the local level, with some seeing it as oppressive while others regard it as liberating for themselves and/or others. Through this paper’s approach, questions of who benefits and who loses out from large scale investments at the pastoral margins, and whether such investments do deliver poverty-reducing development as is often claimed, are addressed.