Community engagement and participation are some key tenets of ethical capitalism. Many studies of development and natural resource governance echo the call for inclusive mechanisms that allow local people in marginal frontier regions to have a say in the processes that shape their future.
Commendable as participation is, some questions emerge: how, in the first place, are notions of community imagined and enacted in frontier regions? Whose vision of community is represented? How is cooperation produced at the interface of engagement and what sort of moral economies emerge from such sites? How do these economies differ from the existing forms of social relations? Plus, to what extent do these forms of engagement create (artificial) boundaries in a bid to isolate “affected” or “impacted” groups within a so-called community? In considering the "allocative dimensions" of resources, what are the competing ethics of distribution driving inclusion/exclusion?
This paper will address such questions through an investigation of community engagement practices in Turkana County following the advent of oil exploration. My ethnographic research suggests the need for a close examination of how the social forces that produce and reinforce inequality are created from the everyday entanglements of quotidian life. Thus, in a locality like Turkana, with a long history of marginalisation, oil presents a stage where old crises of belonging, entitlements and inclusion are re-articulated with new struggles of what/who exactly is “the community.”
Drawing on 14 months ethnographic research, this paper argues that community engagement is a place-making project and a relational process of soliciting cooperation that produce situated identities. As an interface, to borrow Norman Long’s (1989) concept, it is a critical point where knowledge systems meet, transform and acquire new meanings.
Turkana County became the host community for Kenya’s potential economic future with the discovery of crude oil reserves in 2012. In a twist of fate as it were, the region became popular for reasons other than poverty, hunger, drought and marginalisation. Located in the north-western part of Kenya predominantly inhabited by nomadic pastoralists, resource imaginations fuelled new articulations of citizenship, inclusion and claim making.
Oil’s virtual presence were manifest in the material opportunities available from the investing company’s social investment projects albeit temporary in most cases.
My argument then, is the ethical project of participation neither ensures equitable distribution nor does it alter the social forces that perpetuate inequality. Rather, it creates new kinds of subjectivities and social relations that emphasise particular knowledge systems and essentialist ideas of "community".
The chapter shows how the project of partnership take on material forms as locals navigate homogenising categories and templates to assert their own enactments of “host communities” and benefits.