Northern Rangelands Trust and Kenya's community conservancies
The Northern Rangelands Trust links community conservancies across northern and coastal Kenya to wildlife management, grazing plans, security, tourism, donor finance, enterprise, and public services. Elected conservancy institutions have created jobs, women's businesses, peace work, and locally valued security in some places. They have also redrawn mobile pastoral commons, concentrated technical and financial authority in an umbrella organization, and generated serious disputes over consent, ranger power, intercommunity access, land registration, carbon rights, and whether a community legal form gives ordinary landholders practical control.
Can an umbrella network give pastoral communities enough organization, finance, and bargaining power to govern wildlife and rangelands without hardening commons or moving practical authority upward?