Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T15:30:42.510Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Negotiating Access to Land & Resources at the Geothermal Frontier in Baringo, Kenya

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2023

Get access

Summary

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).

Type
Chapter
Information
Land, Investment and Politics
Reconfiguring Eastern Africa's Pastoral Drylands
, pp. 101 - 109
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×