Perspectives on large-scale investment in Africa’s rural margins often start from the assumption that projects happen in socio-ecological and livelihood settings that were relatively stable and undisturbed until new developments. Yet in Kenya’s northern Rift Valley recent large-scale infrastructural investments intersect with longer-term changes in land use, livelihoods and internal differentiation. Describing looming dramatic changes in this previously marginalised pastoralist hinterland, a 2015 headline in The Economist declared that ‘a glimpse of Africa’s future’ was apparent in the region’s transformation. Africa’s largest wind energy development near Lake Turkana (see Drew, Chapter 5 this book), the planned Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) regional corridor (see Chome, Chapter 2 and Elliott, Chapter 3), along with the massive expansion of geothermal power generation, are among the largest projects, all linked by the modernist longings of Kenya’s Vision 2030. The pastoral rangelands of northern Kenya, a region hitherto bypassed by state or global capital investment in infrastructure or services, and characterised as impoverished, marginalised and peripheral, is being reimagined as a frontier brimming with resource wealth and new markets that can help fuel the country’s economic development. However, while conjuring economic growth and transformation, new large-scale investments create anxieties around land grabbing, displacement and exclusions as well.

Based on fieldwork carried out in Baringo, in Kenya’s northern Rift Valley (see Map 8.1), over different periods since 2009, this chapter explores how the rapid spread of dryland farming among the pastoral Pokot is happening alongside and entwining with the early development of geothermal power. It uses different concepts of the ‘frontier’ to examine the intersections of these processes and how they mutually reinforce each other in ways that lead to profound competition for and revaluation of land.

Seeing the frontier

Recent attempts to conceptualise the spread of capitalist relations and state power in the rural margins have invoked the idea of an advancing resource frontier (Watts 2018; Li 2014a; Korf et al. 2015; Mosley and Watson 2016; Tsing 2003). An implicit assumption in many assessments is that communities in and around sites of new large-scale investment are bystanders in broader processes of transformation. Conceptualisations of the advancing resource frontier often start from Turner’s (1894) analysis of settler expansion into the American West, a narrative criticised for, among other things, its supremacist and teleological perspectives (Geiger 2009; Klein 1996).