In an era of so-called ethical capitalism, global codes of conduct have proliferated to regulate the operations of investors and companies involved in the extractives sector. Local consent and the participation of host communities, combined with transparency and accountability mandates for multinationals and national governments, now constitute benchmarks to measure corporate social performance. While this has increased the prominence given to indigenous communities in the last couple of decades, as many have gained traction in mobilising for resource rights by drawing on these global templates of ethical extraction, the politics of participation and inclusion are not without limits. This chapter explores the inadvertent outcomes of local-level struggles in Turkana County around power, inclusion and voice: contentions that belie any notion of a unified way of ‘seeing’ extractive development, let alone a homogeneous agreement on who should benefit and on what grounds. Whose voice counts? Whose knowledge matters? Who is the ‘community’?

Such questions are at the forefront of debates around oil finds in Turkana County, a historically marginalised hinterland in Kenya’s far north-west now being promoted as one of Kenya’s new ‘dream zones’ (Cross 2014) of economic progress. Since the discovery of oil beneath the sprawling rangelands of the South Lokichar Basin in southern Turkana in 2012, state and investor efforts to win over local opinion in the host community have included promises of lucrative benefits, the transformation of livelihoods and economic prospects for the area’s predominantly pastoral inhabitants. Consultations have been held in public and private with a cross-section of local ‘stakeholders’ complemented by corporate-funded ‘development’ projects in a move to obtain a ‘social license to operate’ (Dolan and Rajak 2016; Prno and Slocombe 2012; Rajak 2011). Local politicians continue to demand ‘a rightful share’ (Star 2017b; Ferguson 2015) for their constituents while civil society groups mobilise to scrutinise investor operations and sensitise local residents to their rights. Yet the manifold ways that investors have sought to engage with ‘community stakeholders’, and social audits carried out by non-state actors, have not allayed local concerns of being ‘cheated’ of the benefits from resource extraction in Turkana. For, as Barry notes, consultations do not particularly guarantee the total incorporation of local concerns. Rather, ‘consultation may be treated by an oil company or an international institution as a technical practice of qualification’ (Barry 2006: 247).