De-/Fencing Grasslands: Ongoing Boundary Making and Unmaking in Postcolonial Kenya

Mette Løvschal and Marie Ladekjær Gravesen
Additional contact information
Mette Løvschal: Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Moesgaard Allé 20, 8270 Højbjerg, Denmark
Marie Ladekjær Gravesen: Danish Institute for International Studies, Østbanegade 117, 2100 København, Denmark

Land, 2021, vol. 10, issue 8, 1-21

Abstract: Across contemporary East Africa, fencing is spreading with incredible speed over hundreds of thousands of hectares of rangelands, fundamentally reconfiguring land tenure dynamics. But why is this happening now, what are the precursors, and what will happen in the years to come? In this article, we ask how pre- and post-colonial landscape gridding perpetuate a slow violence across the landscape through processes of de-/fencing. Fencing, we argue, is embedded in a landscape logic that favours exclusive rights and conditioned access. In two case studies from grazing lands in Kenya, we explore how people engage with the tension of an imposed landscape logic of fencing by either asserting or challenging its very physicality. We propose that de-/fencing are ways of anticipating long-standing land tenure uncertainties. Moreover, we use our cases to explore different points of reference along the mattering of land tenure boundaries as well as the sort of horizons to which fencing leads. We also use this knowledge to improve our understanding of parallel prehistoric cases of large-scale landscape enclosure. By unfolding the intertwined socio-political and material nature of gridded landscapes, we seek to bring the study of fencing out of conservation literature and into its wider culture-historical context.

Keywords: fencing; pastoralism; Kenya; East Africa; post-colonialism; land-use; land privatization; conservation policies; grazing land (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/10/8/786/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/10/8/786/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:10:y:2021:i:8:p:786-:d:602228

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().