**Gargule A. Achiba**

Centre for Development and Environment, University of Bern, Mittelstrasse 43, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland; gargule.achiba@cde.unibe.ch

Received: 13 November 2018; Accepted: 29 December 2018; Published: 4 January 2019

**Abstract:** State-led development visions and the accompanying large-scale investments at the geographical margins of Kenya rest on the potential of public–private partnerships to fast-tract sustainable development through accelerated investments. Yet, the conceptualisation, planning and implementation of these visions often deploy a depoliticising development discourse that reinforces and expands long-standing misconceptions about the margins primarily directed at pastoral livelihoods and related communal land tenure. This paper illustrates how the implementation of a wind energy project employs the corporate strategies of depoliticising both land claims and development interventions. In Northern Kenya, private sector participation in large-scale wind energy infrastructure has created a complex development apparatus in which players are empowered to undertake the accelerated investments required to shape the delivery of the Kenya Vision 2030 in the region. An analysis of corporate actors' strategies in the implementation of the contested wind farm presents a depoliticised framing of "low-cost green energy", representations of pastoral land tenure and corporate social responsibility strategies through which dispossession is justified and legitimised. This case underscores the extent to which corporate counterresistance is shaped by the reproduction of a historical depoliticised discourse about pastoralism and communal tenure and challenges the traditional narrative of government hegemony against local resistance to large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs).

**Keywords:** large-scale land acquisitions; common pool resources; green energy; corporate social responsibility

### **1. Introduction**

Recent scholarship has produced a wide range of insightful analyses on the trajectories and dynamics of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and related grassroots mobilisation against their dispossessing potential. Within this vast literature, LSLAs of common property resources (CPRs) have received limited attention despite their legal vulnerability and preferential targeting by the grabbing processes. Nevertheless, several important studies have highlighted the historical shifts in the commodification of land relations [1], the role of law and government policy embedded in neoliberal economic ideologies in consolidating dispossessory trends in CPRs [2] and the political reactions from below to commons grabbing [3]. This paper contributes to these debates by emphasizing the role of historical construction and denial of the proprietary character of communal tenure and their reproduction in contemporary technical "development" discourse [4] in creating and perpetuating commons dispossession. Contemporary LSLAs, which are deeply embedded in institutions and policy planning systems of the state, are presented as "new" development visions to throw off aid dependencies [5] and are expressed as an "unavoidable prerequisite for implementing the productivity-enhancing technologies" [6], hence dispossessing indigenous communities by securing exclusionary rights over their common pool resources.

Drawing from the case study of a wind power development project in Northern Kenya, the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project (LTWP), this contribution critically analyses the historical and contemporary technical discourse around the "visions of viability" [7] of pastoralism enacted through colonial and postcolonial policy and planning and their practical and political consequences for LSLA of community land. The key questions guiding the analysis of this contribution are as follows: how does state 'development' discourse on pastoral commons inform present-day legitimisation of commons dispossession, and, more importantly, how do commercial and political interests select from diverse delegitimising discourse to maintain and promote alternative investments in communally owned land? To answer these questions, this paper analyses how the introduction of investment designed to provide reliable and low-cost green energy to the pastoral commons at the margins of Kenya reproduces colonial misconceptions on local livelihoods, customary tenure and the utilisation of common pool resources. The pursuit of the LTWP project, a new flagship project under the *Kenya Vision 2030*, has created unresolved contest between corporate entities involved in the LTWP project and indigenous pastoral communities trying to resist exclusion from their access to critical CPRs.

The case study in this paper is derived from Sarima in the Mt. Kulal region of Marsabit County, an arid region in Northern Kenya and home to autonomous and tribally-based migratory pastoralist societies that include the Rendille, Samburu, Gabra and Turkana. With its large central plains, the Mt. Kulal region covers approximately 20,000 km<sup>2</sup> of bushland and dwarf shrublands dotted with lines of seasonal sand rivers that dry out in the open plains. Despite the low annual rainfall of less than 500 mm, the proximity of the Eastern shores of Lake Turkana has important impacts on the hydrology of the area, including being an important source of perennial grasses. As a major dry season resource with enough open grasslands, the Mt. Kulal region is a point of convergence for migratory pastoral groups, which necessitates intertribal negotiations for rangeland pasture and water resources. In 2006, the isolated and hitherto marginalised Mt. Kulal region was set for transformation with the authorisation of an LTWP comprising a wind farm with 365 wind turbines and related infrastructure on 150,000 acres of land, a high voltage substation, an associated transmission line and 204 km of road upgrades. In 2014, communities in the Laisamis Constituency brought a case to Kenya's Environment and Land Court (ELC) for the immediate cessation of all project activities by the LTWP, citing irregular, unprocedural and illegal acquisition and annexation of community land, commissioning of a "self-serving" [8] Socio-Economic and Environmental Impact Assessment (SEIA) by the proprietors of the LTWP project and denial of the indigenous status of communities around the Mt. Kulal region. Challenging the community case in the ELC, the LTWP, through its lawyers, submitted that the land in question was "uninhabited—the community was not being merely left on the roadside" and "situated in the middle of nowhere" and that LTWP investment was "a *Kenya Vision 2030* flagship project which has benefitted the community immensely and will continue to benefit them." [8].

The countercontestation to the community opposition to the LTWP offers a glimpse into the development discourse that legitimises commons grabbing. The LTWP fits a wider and well documented pattern of the depoliticisation of development [4] and the extension of state control through a specific knowledge structure that presents pastoralism as unviable and legitimises large-scale investments as the ideal. Furthermore, it demonstrates how, as argued by Cousins and Scoones [7], by creating technical discourse around visions of economic viability, large-scale investments become enacted through policy and planning without interrogation. Further, the LTWP case illustrates the relevance of the notion of the "anti-politics machine" as a lens to analyze depoliticisation within development discourse. The discussion presented in this paper about the depoliticisation of development interventions is based on the understanding of pastoralism as a rational adaptation to an environment dominated by variability through mobility and utilisation of common pool resources (CPR) held in common property institutions. Though mobility, pastoralists can interface extreme variability in the environment with variability in the production system [9], hence exploiting the economic benefits associated with flexibility [10].

This paper draws on James Ferguson's thesis of an anti-politics machine to examine historically conditioned colonial discourses about pastoralism and the tradition of their reproduction in development discourses in postcolonial investment and policy in pastoral regions to legitimise the dispossession of commons. The paper proceeds as follows: The next section presents Ferguson's anti-politics machine framework before a presentation of historical representations and dispossession of the pastoral commons in the Kenyan context. This is followed by descriptions of the study area and research methods. The paper then considers the key anti-politics machine derived from the LTWP's wind power development to identify a myriad of strategies employed by the LTWP project to justify its investment. These strategies are then used to demonstrate the discursive relations between the LTWP's anti-politics machine and the broader historical and contemporary development discourse that shapes the dispossession of pastoral commons. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on the relevance of depoliticisation on commons dispossession and how such contested appropriation of commons constitutes "resilience grabbing", with deleterious impacts on commons reliance on CPRs.

#### **2. Anti-Politics Machine and Common Pool Resources in Kenya**

A theoretical understanding of anti-politics in development discourse and practice was developed by anthropologist James Ferguson. While studying state power and development discourse in Lesotho, Ferguson illustrated how supposedly "politically neutral" development interventions overlooked complex political and structural realities within specific communities—what he termed "anti-politics machines" of development [4]. The anti-politics machine thesis argues that development institutions have a tendency to "generate their own form of discourse" by creating "a structure of knowledge" around subjects of development interventions that have the effect of expanding and entrenching the bureaucratic power of the state as well as projecting a representation of economic and social life that denies and suspends politics and its effects [4]. Consequently, development interventions "inevitably adopt a technocratic and universalizing approach that tends to obscure both the essentially political character of many development problems and the local and national political processes on who gets to define and benefit from development' [11]." Ferguson further observes that despite the widespread and apparently unintended consequences of their development interventions, governments and their networks of donor agencies continue to justify increased and similar interventions based on the same erroneous assumptions. However, as Buscher argues, "anti-politics can serve the necessary political strategy to try to 'make things happen in' or 'get things out of' intensely politicised and increasingly commoditised environments [12]."

Ferguson's work has been criticised for ignoring a "third discourse" in development that represents the subject of development projects as "the rurally based, land-poor migrant worker" who would benefit from having a "market, or a road, or a school, or a clinic only 5–10 miles away, instead of 50 [13]." Similarly, Ferguson's argument that the development apparatus constitutes an "anti-politics machine depoliticising everything it touches" [4] has been questioned. Examining historical and contemporary development interventions in Indonesia, Li argues that development programs may "become a politically charged arena" in which rules and claims are constantly reassessed and reworked [14]. However, Ferguson's thesis has been extensively used to critically examine how knowledge is generated and used in development and has continued to be provide useful analyses of the effects of development interventions. This paper employs Ferguson's framework to structure an analysis of legitimising discourse related to historical and contemporary dispossessions of commons in development interventions in Kenya. The framework's focus on construction of development representation and their institutional rationales is appropriate given the development policies and strategies employed in the study area. The four theoretical premises for development representation and the institutional rationales of Ferguson's framework included the following [4]:

(a) That the target of development programs is not yet incorporated into the modern world and that investments in infrastructure, education, introduction of cash economy, etc., can "open it up" and transform it into a developed modern economy;


#### **3. The Historical Processes of Commons Representations in Kenya**

In Kenya's arid and semiarid lands (ASALs), depoliticisation has long been associated with the social relations related to land and productivity of the dominant land uses. The coming of colonial rule initiated two changes that shaped the future of government policy in relation to ASALs. First, Kenya's ASALs have a problematic history whereby the colonial administration not only constructed the dominant land use—pastoralism—as an "irrational" way of life but instituted legal and policy strategies to introduce private property rights in the ASALs, thereby curtailing mobility and taking away common property resources from the control of flexible customary resource management institutions. This representation of pastoralism was not only isolationist and discriminative but also laid down policies for its restriction, as observed by Zwanenberg:

"The colonial view had consistently been that pastoral, and particular nomadic activities, were primitive, backward and to be discouraged. This view underlay the permanency of the stock control regulations, and especially the quarantine [screening] regulations, which precluded any official encouragement of stock trade." [15]

Pastoral livelihoods in the ASALs depended on spatial and social mobility to interface extreme variability in the environment with variability in the production system [9] by making use of a wide range of natural resources, social resources and opportunities [16]. However, colonialism created boundaries challenging pastoralists' imperative of free movement, "disrupting the natural process of adjustment that maintained a balance between people, land and livestock [17]." This colonial restructuring reduced the mobility on which pastoralism depended. In addition, increasing droughts and intensification of disease outbreaks pressured pastoral households.

Second, the colonial white settlers erroneously perceived any unoccupied piece of land as "no man's land" and annexed it. Under the colonial "civilisation" mission, the colonial administrators began the process of individualisation of rights in land as "the first stage in the modern departure from the customary system of landholding [18]." This ideology enabled European settlers and corporations to take for themselves the best land and mineral resources, including fragmenting the pastoralist domain and fracturing pastoralist communities, which, according to Markakis, is "a historic injustice that awaits redress [19]." The colonial state not only enforced individual rights in land to exclude others but also "claimed all apparently 'vacant' or 'unused' land for itself as 'public land', so that occupiers lacking express approval could be treated as squatters in the land of their birth, and evicted [18]." By imposing private property rights on critical rangeland resources, such as dry season grazing areas and migration routes, the colonial government contributed to the transformation of pastoral rangelands, supporting and reproducing vulnerability to risks.

The independent Kenyan administration, in a bid to achieve development and defeat the three ills of disease, ignorance and poverty, stated that development planning is the most important instrument to achieve those goals. However, the colonial regulatory and policy infrastructure was transferred largely intact and was endorsed and funded by international development agencies. In the ASALs, narratives of scarcity in lowland ecologies and productivity of pastoral economies became the cornerstone of development planning. Most of the development strategies adopted after independence were "technical" solutions that had "the allure and unquestionable legitimacy of science [16]." For instance, the premise of range management concepts such as "carrying capacity",

"cattle complex" [20] and "tragedy of commons" [21] became a handy simplification of the complex African pastoral system. Accordingly, issues of donor mobilisation around critical areas of ASAL development became a key part of government interventions to include volume and value production. The 1970s saw the introduction of group ranches that were "promoted with the intention of easing the transition from communal tenure and encouraging commercial production by offering veterinary support and better access to markets [16]." However, the group ranches model was incompatible with the way in which pastoralists managed collective access to resources [16], and consequently, critical common property resources were lost, leading to the displacement of pastoralists

Recent trends in regional and national development policies towards the ASALs have seen efforts to "rectify" [22] this historical marginalisation through inclusive policies and state-led development "visions" that aim to open up these areas as "new frontiers for development" and incorporate them into the state [5]. These "new visions" of development are being created to increase agricultural productivity [23], generate mineral resources for export [24] and expand infrastructure required for regional economic integration [25]. These new visions were also responsible for a change in narratives from constructing pastoralism as an "irrational way of life" to understanding the unique challenges to the development of the region and the rationale for protecting and promoting mobility and supporting the pastoral customary institutions [26]. The deployment of LSLAs and the related infrastructure installations have been accompanied by many perceived advantages, including addressing unsustainable fossil-fueled economies and the Earth's climate crisis [27,28]. Consequently, there is considerable pressure to invest in reenabled energy projects globally as part of a long term strategy to achieve the dual goal of meeting targets to increase shares of renewable energy (and by extension reduce the reliance on greenhouse gas (GHG)-emitting fossil fuels) and enhance environmental sustainability [29,30]. However, renewable energy projects around the globe have been associated with "land grabbing", which is "a measure used by some governments (and corporations) to meet their food and energy requirements by acquiring land in a foreign country [31]." Experiences around the world indicate fierce sociopolitical conflicts in relation to renewable energy installations [32,33]. Traditionally, the terrain of contestation comprises diverse issues ranging from "struggles against dispossession" involving expulsion and dispossession of land from local communities to issues of incorporation and the terms of such inclusions [33,34]. As a result, contestations against mobilisation around renewable energy have not only mobilised a wide range of actors, including human rights, agrarian and environmental activists [34] but also involve diverse strategies of resistance from covert to more open opposition to dispossession and terms of inclusion [35,36].

LSLAs involve a great deal of political dynamics involving transformations in existing infrastructure, land rushes and reconfigurations of local livelihoods [37,38]. In the context of common property systems, land rush has been associated with the unintended effects of transforming and redefining common land rights essential for the communal systems of production that ensure the sustainable use of natural resources. Among the African commons, this is particularly exacerbated by the weak status of community-derived ownership over the commons [39] from years of government policy measures that sought to take rights and responsibilities related to natural resources out of the hands of local communities [39,40]. While government policies and their impacts on communal ownership do play a significant role in the ease by which commons are easy targets of LSLAs in general, the vulnerability of commons to LSLAs has been thought to be exacerbated by the incompatibilities between uses, claims and values that common users attach to natural resources on one hand and the commodification goals of governments that seek to formalise property rights on the other [2,41,42]. As LSLAs unfold, the dispossession of commons is leading to a loss of principal and scarce natural capital, with grave implications for social and political stability.

In Kenya, the development vision of achieving prosperity and middle-income status by 2030 contained in *Kenya Vision 2030* has impacted the scale and approaches to commons dispossession. Growing recognition of ASALs as "new frontiers of opportunity" were accentuated in the government's

U-turn in its understanding and investments in the ASALs after decades of marginalisation, and this has been articulated in development visions such as *Kenya Vision 2030* with massive investments in infrastructure, energy and irrigated agriculture. Vision 2030 and related policy visions have an array of strategies for transforming the ASALs. First, through the creation of new development corridors—"networks of roads, railways, pipelines and ports that facilitate the movement of commodities" [43]—the frontier areas are expected to be incorporated fully into the state [5]. Second, these strategies aim to "create an enabling environment for private sector participation in infrastructure and technology development, including appropriate tax breaks and incentives, in all areas of infrastructure investment [26]." Third, Vision 2030 aims to transform the country into "a newly industrializing, middle income country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens in a clean and secure environment", including sector specific flagship projects. While these visions are conceptualised as transformations to space, there is a great deal of uncertainty on exactly when and where they will materialize [5]. In addition, it is unclear whether the redesignation of ASALs as new frontiers of opportunity is demonstrative of the recurrent reassessment of development concepts witnessed in the last five decades or is, in fact, a reinterpretation of the quality of territory for green and bioeconomic forms of development [44].

The legacy of these development visions on ASALs is already evident in the inevitable physical and social fragmentations of the ASALs' landscapes, claims of dispossession of indigenous communities and contested land politics. According to Browne, one of the major *Kenya Vision 2030* flagship projects, the Lamu-South Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET), "has failed to realise the developmentalist 'Africa rising' narrative of its promoters" [45]. For pastoral commons along the path of the LAPSSET project, inevitable disruptions of migration routes and losses of crucial dry season fallback zones during drought [46] constitute what has been dubbed "resilience grabbing". Moreover, development visions have been associated with "the new scramble for Africa": dispossession of land characterised by "the haste, the lack of negotiation about conditions, the privileging of foreigners over locals and when we know that c. 70% of the land thus far acquired is not (yet) taken into production [47]." Furthermore, the framing of development visions often engenders a discourse of depoliticisation of the local land use and the natural resource context typically enacted by governments and their investors to legitimise dispossession as state appropriation of "unused" or "vacant" land [47]. This sees the state exhibiting anti-politic strategies not only through "development by dispossession" but also through encouraging and endorsing corporate agencies' CSR and greenwashing strategies of sustainable development narratives to preempt resistance and minimise conflict.

#### **4. Methods and Study Site**

#### *4.1. Data and Methods*

The empirical material for this article is drawn from field work that took place between July 2016 and June 2018 in the Northern Kenya County of Marsabit (see Figure 1), where, since 2006, the local government authorities with support from national government institutions has proactively enabled a private corporation to acquire 150,000 acres of community land to implement a wind power project expected to add 310 MW to the national grid. The objective of the field work was to examine mechanics of the 2006 acquisition of 150,000 acres of community land for wind power development by the LTWP consortium, grassroots political resistance to the project and attempts by state and corporate actors to restrict and manage contestation of the wind power project. This paper employed a qualitative data collection strategy aimed at identifying: (a) the main actors in the grassroots resistance to the LTWP project, their characteristics and their underlying ideological and campaign strategies and the subjects of their suit; (b) the coercive and anti-political maneuvering and counterresistance measures of the LTWP project and affiliated government institutions; and, (c) how diverse delegitimising "development" discourse employed by the LTWP project is associated with historical delegitimisation of pastoral commons and the generalizability of these strategies in similar contexts. This strategy entailed the collection of the three types of data used in the study: semi-structured interview responses, a content analysis of ELC proceedings and archival and secondary data from government policy and publicly available LTWP project documents.

First, the main actors in the grassroots resistance to the wind power project were identified through a review of court documents relating to the ELC Civil Suit No 163 of 2014 and key informants. At this stage, two main groups of actors were identified: (a) the petitioners (TPs) and (b) the interested parties (IPs). Further, apart from the LTWP project, which the TPs identified as the main respondent, a third category of actors was identified: (c) government institutions with direct responsibility for land administration in the study area including the County Government of Marsabit, The Attorney General, the Chief Land Registrar and the National Land Commission (NLC). Semi-structured interviews were administered to the members and the leadership of two grassroots groups in the ELC Civil Suit No 163 of 2014, which included a set of key informant surveys (i.e., three key leaders in each group; N = 6); a set of key informants in the areas represented by each group (N = 16); key informants drawn from the National Land Commission (NLC) (N = 2); officials of the County Government of Marsabit (N=5); members of County Representatives in the Marsabit County Assembly (CA) (N = 6); and political aspirants for national and county assembly seats in Laisamis Constituency (N = 5). Responses from the TPs and IPs revealed the historical context and the channels of expression of the grassroots resistance to the LTWP project, the coercive and anti-political maneuvering and counterresistance measures of the LTWP project and affiliated government institutions. Details of community land acquisition for the project were obtained from records of the now defunct Marsabit County Council and semistructured interviews with four former Marsabit County Council councilors and five serving County Representatives in the Marsabit County Assembly (CA). Government policy documents, LTWP documents, correspondences and court proceedings were obtained to triangulate community claims and the corporate counterclaims and narratives legitimising the project. Archival research conducted in the Kenya National Archives between July 2016 and June 2017 was used to understand historical aspects of communal land and ASALs legal land institutions.

Second, the anti-political nature of discourse associated with the LTWP project case was investigated by reviewing publicly available government and company documents and the proceedings of the ELC Civil Suit No 163 of 2014. Through critical analysis of documents, court proceeding and related rulings and additional materials from secondary sources, the paper identified discourses associated with Kenya's key development visions and green energy, including counter-framings of the TP application; the company's representations of community land and related claims of illegal land acquisition; and the meanings associated with the company's corporate social responsibility (CSR) investments and the indigenous status of the local communities. These analyses paid attention to the practices and strategies of the LTWP project regarding the "depoliticisation" of green energy, land redistribution claims of TPs, communal tenure and local communities. Finally, from the analysis of the first two sets of data, the paper identified strategies of depoliticisation, their articulation and the mechanisms for their reproduction employed by the LTWP project and its network of local and national actors as well as how they relate to the dominant colonial and postcolonial discourse that delegitimised pastoral commons and legitimised alternative large-scale investments as the ideal.

However, there is need to highlight a methodological shortcoming of research on "land grab". Given some of the characteristics of LSLAs, Oya points out that land deals generally provide "killer facts that raise awareness and induce action [48]." While certainly not ruling out all sources of potential bias from the interview conducted with key informants—given land (and by extension the LTWP project) is a key issue around which local politics are organised—this paper tries to address these problems by focusing on the multiple layers and contradictions by disaggregating, clarifying and testing various claims and counter claims used by different interviewees, as suggested by Oya. In addition, the paper tries to enhance the comparability of the arguments and counterarguments in the ELC Civil Suit No 163 of 2014 with historical discourse on pastoralism development.

**Figure 1.** Map of Marsabit County highlighting the study area.

#### *4.2. Study Area*

Marsabit County falls within the larger ASALs of Kenya and is among the 3 counties comprising the upper Eastern bloc. Marsabit County is the largest county in Kenya in terms of land mass (70,961.2 km2) and has a population of 291,166 [49] people, which includes three major migrant pastoralist groups: Boran, Gabra and Rendille. Marsabit County comprises extensive plains lying between 300 and 900 m above sea level and an extensive dwarf-shrub grassland or a very dry form of bushed grassland [50]. The county is also endowed with mountain ranges, including the Ol Donyo Ranges (2066 m above sea level) in the southwest, Mt. Marsabit (1865 m above sea level) in the central part of the county, the Hurri Hills (1685 m above sea level) in the Northeastern part of the county and Mt. Kulal (2235 m above sea level) in the northwest [50]. The constitutive plains comprise diverse ecological zones ranging from subhumid to arid that form a natural habitat for diverse grasses and shrubs that provide pasture in different seasons. Migrant pastoral communities utilise these diverse pasture types through the migration of herds.

Marsabit County and the entire arid region of Northern Kenya have been politically and economically removed from the power of the state. According to Catley et al., these borderlands have been "beyond the reach of the state and so the development industry" and, as such, have been designated as "sites of famine, destitution and impoverishment....while contributing little tax or tribute to state coffers [51]." However, in an apparent U-turn from the marginalisation policy, the Kenyan state embarked on a "rebalancing of national development" through "accelerated investment in previously neglected regions essential for sharing in the promise and benefits of Vision 2030" [26] including "interventions required to bring the ASALs to the same threshold as the rest of the country [52]." The state-led development visions still have the old stereotypes, including a distinct security dimension, but they also articulate a "new departure....to transform them [5]." The premise underlying these development visions is that "the Government will release the latent potential of the arid and semiarid lands in livestock, tourism, and renewable energy, and regions comparative advantage in its strategic location as Kenya's bridgehead to the markets of North Africa and the Middle East [26]." Some of the major projects outlined in Kenya's development vision for the development of Northern Kenya include large-scale infrastructure development and renewable energy development, including "prioritizing the development of transport corridors linking Kenya to key markets in Ethiopia, South Sudan and Somalia and beyond them to the Middle East, such as the Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia transport corridor [26]." Constructed under the "imagery of a seamless Africa" [43] for ease of movement of capital, commodities and people, they have had negative impacts such as the emergence of "economies of anticipation" for benefits and compensations [5].

The LTWP was launched in Sarima in 2006 as a *Vision 2030* flagship project with funding from a consortium of international investors. The project website offers a brief introduction to the 310 MW wind farm underlining green energy and partnership with local public power company:

"Once operational, the wind farm will provide 310 MW of reliable, low-cost energy to Kenya's national grid (i.e., approx. 17% of the country's installed capacity), which will be bought at a fixed price by Kenya Power and Lighting Company Ltd. (KPLC) over a 20-year period in accordance with the Power Purchase Agreement." [53]

The Sarima area of the Mt. Kulal region comprises large arid plains with a hill mass, Mt. Kulal, to the east and Lake Turkana to the west. Endowed with a unique geographical condition, Sarima experiences strong predictable wind streams as a result of fluctuations in daily temperatures between Lake Turkana and the desert hinterland. Located between Mt. Kulal and Mt. Nyiro, Sarima is a valley that acts as a funnel in which wind streams are accelerated to high speeds, 11 m per second, which are among the highest recorded in the world. Sarima is thus endowed with extractable wind power, which the LTWP has translated into a capacity of 300 MW. Consequently, the LTWP was designated as a flagship project of *Kenya Vision 2030* to the extent that the project will generate reliable green energy at a lower cost through a public-private partnership (PPP). Following a memorandum of understanding signed between the KPLC and the LTWP on 10 April 2008, the wind farm facility, comprising 365 turbines, a high voltage substation and a transmission line, was begun in 2014. The LTWP, Kenya's biggest PPP, with an investment of over \$700 million that is expected to increase the country's energy output by 15–20%, was promoted as socially and environmentally benign with positive impacts on sustainable energy, job creation and the development of rural Northern Kenya.

Designated as the largest wind farm in Africa, the LTWP project also drew the interest of international development funding agencies with interest in renewable energy and carbon credit generating assets. The project is financed by a consortium of international donors, including the African Development Bank (AfDB), Finn Fund, Norfund, the Danish Investment Fund for Developing Countries (IFU), the Danish Export Credit Agency (EKF) and Vestas, which manufactures turbines. Initially, the World Bank was interested in providing risk guarantee for the project but withdrew its support in 2012 with concerns around Kenya's capacity to consume all of the electricity generated

by the project [54] and fears that the Power Purchase Agreement would expose the country to large financial risk [55]. However, in 2018, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), World Bank's corporate finance branch signed a cooperation agreement with the Finnish government for a €114 million loan to the LTWP project as part of its support for wind power projects across the continent [56]. After the withdrawal of the World Bank, AfDB stepped in to provide partial risk guarantee to the other project financiers.

Relatedly, it was not long before the procedure of land acquisition and the socio-economic and environmental impacts of the project were questioned considering the socioecological and cultural and religious affiliations attached to the region by the pastoralist communities. In 2014, residents of the Laisamis Constituency and Karare Ward in Marsabit County filed a lawsuit in Kenya's ELC to contest the "unprocedural and illegal" acquisition of 150,000 acres of community land in Sarima, including a lack of public consultation or compensation for affected communities. The land in question was constitutionally designated as Trust Land with clear procedures for setting apart public consultation and compensation in accordance with the *Trust Lands Act Cap 288.* The communities argued that the unprocedural acquisition of their land will not only alter the use of land but will also permanently alter the landscape, which will render them unable to seasonally and cyclically use pasture lands, cultural sites and a camel migration corridor to Lake Turkana.

Furthermore, the petitioners, acting on behalf of pastoral communities that jointly utilise the common grazing plains of Sarima, accused the LTWP of carrying out a "self-serving Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA)" [57] without involving the communities in the area and without evaluating the possible negative impacts of the project on the economic, social, cultural and physical well-beings of the indigenous communities in the area [8]. Moreover, the petitioners claimed that the application for an additional 110,000 acres in addition to the LTWP's initial application of 40,000 acres occurred at an excessively rapid pace and with substantial secrecy, thereby disallowing time for procedures for setting apart community land in accordance with the Trust Lands Act. According to the petitioners, the unprocedural acquisition of community land and the possible negative impacts of the project on local communities have led to growing public discontent and hence their application to the ELC for termination of the wind power development.

Nevertheless, the construction of the wind farm continued without interruption, even as the ELC determined that the issues before it were important legally. In a court ruling dated 18 March 2016, the ELC ordered the LTWP to confine its activities to the 87.5 acres it was given to utilise and to ensure that resident communities' access to Lake Turkana through the project was not blocked [8]. In addition, the case was referred for mediation by the Marsabit CA to encourage an out of court settlement of the issues in dispute. Despite delays in the determination of the court, there was little concerted resistance to the project except in the Kargi location, where the company trucks were blocked by the Kargi residents from accessing the wind site through the Marsabit–Kargi–Loiyangalani route. Other road blockages by the local communities were reported from settlements along the Laisamis–Loiyangalani route with communities reporting concerns around employment and frustrations over delays by the LTWP project to address their complaints [58]. The lack of concerted community activism was attributed to the fact that, despite widespread opposition to the project by communities and their local leaders, some local political leaders from the area and the local government were in full support of the project, to which a Rendille elder desperately remarked, "with some of our leaders eating from the enemy's (LTWP) pot, how can we achieve a united front to confront this monster?"(Interview\_024\_Rendille Elder, interviewed in Meru Law Courts on 17 March 2016). Indeed, this not only created tension between the two groups but also made the LTWP and land issues in general key campaign issues for the 2017 general elections (Interview\_015, Political seat contestant Marsabit County Assembly, interviewed in Marsabit on the 27 April 2017).

#### **5. The Politics of Grassroots Mobilisation around LTWP Project**

Understanding local resistance to the LTWP project in the local pastoralists' communities necessitates an exploration of the politics of land as well as the territorialised ethnicity in Kenya's pastoral areas. As "arenas of action", political reactions "from below" [33] to the wind power project were symbolic of the prevailing politics of land in the area which found a clear ideological expression following Kenya's 2013 general elections. The local resistance was made up of two groups (see Table 1), the petitioners (TPs) who brought the case against LTWP project to the ELC on behalf of the indigenous communities in Laisamis Constituency and Karare Ward (Karare Ward, largely inhabited by the Samburu speaking Arial group, is a local electoral area of the Marsabit County under Saku constituency. The local groups have claims to the contested area for dry season grazing as well as cultural affiliations) of Marsabit County, and the interested parties (IPs) who asked to be enjoined to the case to represent the interests of the communities residing in the immediate vicinity of the project. The TPs included elected members of the Marsabit County Assembly drawn from the larger Laisamis Constituency. They represented themselves as "patriotic" Rendille and Samburu leaders who put "communities' interest" before their own and described the IP supporting the continuation of the project as "puppets (of the LTWP project) after individual interest." (Interview\_015, Political seat contestant Marsabit County Assembly, interviewed in Marsabit on 27 April 2017). On the other hand, the IPs pictured themselves as "defenders of the local communities rights to development" and claimed that they have "already seen the fruits of this (LTWP project) development" (Interview\_025, Interested Party to the LTWP case, interviewed in Nanyuki on the 30 May 2017). While the claim of the wind project's "development contribution" to the region could be easily rationalised by the IPs, they did not dismiss claims of dispossession that have fueled the opposition to the project. For example, according to one of the IPs:

"As an IP, I do not support any illegality in relation to the land acquisition by the company, and that is precisely why we have asked the court to refer the matter of land acquisition for arbitration. There are certainly unanswered questions related to the procedure of land acquisition. This is a procedural issue which can be corrected." (Interview\_025, Interested Party to the LTWP case, interviewed in Nanyuki on the 30 May 2017)

The nature of ethnic solidarities that epitomises the control of natural resources in the study area remains fundamental to mobilisation efforts against the LTWP project. Historically, Sarima was used for dry season grazing and cultural rights by the Samburu and the Rendille who are bound together by political alliances, kinship ties and negotiated access to resources to create reciprocity [59] However, while reciprocal access and use rights could be granted to neighboring pastoral communities during periods of droughts, hostility to the Turkana by these groups was attributed to practices in resource use such as "Turkana cut trees and burn charcoal, being less concerned about the environment [59]". Hence, while the historical hegemony over Sarima was with the Samburu and Rendille, conflict over dry season water and pasture with migrating Turkana groups was a common occurrence, particularly between the Samburu and Turkana pastoral groups [60,61]. Hence, ethnic contest over natural resources remains fundamental in the area as it has been for decades. TPs emphasise that the company exploited the history of interethnic conflict in the area to reframe the term "indigenous" in a bid to deemphasise the claims of the "resident" Rendille and Samburu groups over claims of the Turkana "migrants" (Interview\_015, Political seat contestant Marsabit County Assembly, interviewed in Marsabit on the 27 April 2017). Specifically, TPs argue that the LTWP project proprietors used the government machinery at national and local levels to "rubber stamp" an illegal land deal (Interview\_031, Petitioner, interviewed in Marsabit on the 18 February 2017).

Another issue is the diversity both of the pastoral communities in the area and the interests that often have an ethnic dimension and tend to provoke political mobilisation around land issues. Two aspects of the political history in the area shaped the character of the resistance movement against the LTWP project. First, following the 2010 Kenyan constitution that devolved power to the local county level, territorialised ethnicity [62] has emerged and has become greatly politicised, leading to coalition building between ethnic groups towards the 2013 elections. Consequently, the 2013 elections were characterised by alliance-making which also brought about an increased role of customary leaders in Marsabit politics [63] in which the idea that every group had a homeland gained ground. This led to the formation of the Rendille-Gabra-Burji (REGABU) coalition which went on to win the inaugural Marsabit County elections in 2013. This dimension of politics also yielded "power sharing" at the community level where the pursuit of ethnic and clan interests emerged as part of the political discourse. As a result, the Rendille and Samburu ethnic groups dominated the politics of the Laisamis Constituency with steady numerical dominance (4 out of 5 ward representatives from the Constituency in the Marsabit County assembly). The fear of losing "homeland" enhanced the local political leverage of the dominant ethnic groups across Marsabit County and posed a constant fear of displacement for minority tribes (Interview\_015, Political seat contestant Marsabit County Assembly, interviewed in Marsabit on the 27 April 2017). Second, the immediate fallout of the 2013 REGABU coalition yielded fresh political realignments for the 2017 elections with an equivocal emphasis on land issues. In the Laisamis Constituency, in particular, land grabbing claims by the LTWP project brought new variations on the political leaders. The main line of confrontation was that political leaders were "either with us, or with the land grabbers (LTWP project)" which was a measure of the 2017 aspirants' degree of "Rendilleness" or "Samburuness" (Interview\_031, Petitioner, interviewed in Marsabit on the 18 February 2017). This emphasis enabled an intimate political mobilisation of communities for the 2017 general elections in Laisamis Constituency.

In the midst of these politicisations, the emerging grassroots resistance to the LTWP project was divergent and un-coordinated, reflecting first, the markedly little past experience with challenging the state's development plans and significant challenges in the knowledge and capacity of communities and associated issues of coordination in popular responses to LSLAs [64]. Second, finding a united front to challenge the infringement of communal rights to land was challenged by unequal power relations and conflicts of interest defined along ethnic identity lines that have characterised natural resources politics in the area for decades [65]. Finally, the framing of land rights within the context of the community and the larger social and cultural context (and the fact that all the representatives of the parties to the land suit were men), offers a continuation of cultural bias towards women and the socially constructed gendered roles of women which "affects the processes by which women's and men's differential relationship, access, control, ownership, and security over land are negotiated [66]."


**Table 1.** Key features of actors in the context of the Lake Turkana Wind Power Project (LTWP) project contestation in the Environment and Land Court (ELC).


**Table 1.** *Cont.*
