Kenya: Wind-power project changes value of pastoral land

Lake Turkana Wind Power in northern Kenya is the largest wind farm in Africa and the biggest private investment in Kenyan history. While the Kenyan Government strongly supports this project, at local level it has been accompanied by accusations of land grabbing, corporate negligence and infringement of customary land rights. The article “The changing value of land in Northern Kenya: the case of Lake Turkana Wind Power” by Zoe Cormack & Abdikadir Kurewa (2018; Critical African Studies 10 (1): 89–107; https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2018.1470017) explores how the wind farm transformed the value of pastoral land and how this affected local social relationships and territoriality.

The large-scale, rapid privatisation of land and infrastructure development led to seemingly contradictory effects: local people sought to access ‘benefits’ from the project and also experienced new forms of exclusion, e.g. related to employment and corporate social investment. As a result, increasingly exclusive claims to land and interpretations of local history have emerged. New values ascribed to the land have generated new feelings of entitlement and raised expectations of ‘development’. These contestations reveal that the value of land is about more than the material resource itself. It rests on what other privileges can be accessed through claims to belonging to a territory.

Posted on 24 April 2022 in Pastoralism & Extractives