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).

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Research in northern Kenya presents evidence that livestock herding remains the most important income activity for households in pastoral settlements, even though non-livestock income activities constitute a significant proportion of household income. This paper explores the socio-economic determinants of pastoral income diversification using rural household data collected from three pastoral settlement in Isiolo County, northern Kenya. This study is concerned with the patterns and determinants of participation in non-pastoral income-earning activities (NPIs), including emerging household strategies and their impact on pastoral livestock production with particular reference to household dependence on livestock income. The results show that the intensity and proportion of NPIs in household incomes are determined by household demographic factors and mobility status. This study concludes that the increase in NPIs that accompanies pastoral livestock production points to the growing importance of livelihood security derived from both managing pastoral livestock production risks and optimizing incentives for non-livestock livelihoods. This finding implies that NPIs are not a substitute for pastoral livelihood, at least not as the base livelihood, in the study area.

Increased legal access and the devolution of natural resource administration are generally seen as sources of power for local communities and their institutions. However, beyond this widely held expectation, the politics of land reform suggest that legal recognition of rights and devolution is not the only issue with implications for communal tenure reforms. Misconceptions about communal tenure, which are rooted in history, and their appropriation by local elites in the processes of communal tenure reform are characteristic of both colonial and post-colonial governments in Kenya. Although typically articulated and promulgated to enhance political representation and to devolve control over resources to the local level, unresolved issues in the reform process have worked to undermine the legitimacy of communal land rights in contemporary Kenyan society. A case study of the post-2010 community land legislation process demonstrates the continuing relevance of historically conditioned political and ideological representations of communal tenure built during the colonial period and reproduced in policy in independent Kenya. This paper offers reflections on the centrality of sustained communal tenure misconceptions, fetishization of formal governance institutions, and the institutional and power configurations that primarily benefit powerful stakeholders as sources of the current breakdown in the implementation of community land law.

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