Land subdivision of Maasai group ranches around Amboseli National Park,Kenya: Drivers,impacts,and the influence of conservation organisations

Abstract

Even though it has allowed Maasai pastoralists to uphold forms of community rangeland management for their livestock, the group ranch regime introduced in Kenya in 1968 was never considered satisfactory. Despite offering democratic opportunities to sustain these traditional practices under new rules, the Community Land Act (CLA) of 2016 has triggered instead a scramble to subdivide rangeland into small, privately owned plots in the Amboseli region, i.e., ∼8000 km² of mostly unfenced savanna and an important, wildlife-rich residual enclave of semi-nomadic pastoralism in Africa. Extensive fieldwork aimed at collecting Maasai narratives during the 2019–2024 period of land allocation, and supported by an analysis of technical reports, media coverage and cartographic data, investigates how communities have been handling land reform. The research documents the categories of actors, power dynamics and spatial outcomes associated with subdivision across five contiguous but socially and ecologically distinct group ranches. It reveals how clan affiliations have warped the land allocation process, and highlights the influence of international conservation NGOs over securing wildlife conservancies on former community land through ‘green leases’, i.e., special agreements with the new class of private landowners. The opaqueness of land deals has fuelled fears among Maasai herders about injustices in land allocation. Patterns nonetheless vary from one ranch to another, resulting in different outcomes for the local land economy. Driven by a mixed agenda of for-profit and non-profit biodiversity conservation, the NGOs have managed to more than double the spatial extent of their leaseholds. Meanwhile, land allocated to pasture has shrunk substantially. These transformations are likely to profoundly reshape the livelihoods of many Maasai pastoralists, who also seem drawn to irrigated agriculture. Whether fencing the landscape will ensue, and whether the piecemeal mosaic of conservancies will peaceably guarantee continuing wildlife dispersal, remains uncertain.