The Amboseli landscape in Kenya has long been facing persistent challenges regarding conservation and development. To mitigate these problems and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), various policy interventions have been initiated, mostly in the form of partnership arrangements. This article examines two such partnerships, the Amboseli Ecosystem Trust (AET) and the Big Life Foundation (BLF), to understand how they contribute to the governance of the Amboseli landscape, and the intrinsic link to power and politics. The research findings, based on document analysis, interviews and focus-group discussions, reveal that the partnerships have performed complementing landscape governance roles. Whereas AET focused on policy development, agenda-setting and meta-governance, BLF concentrated on policy implementation and meta-governance in relation to wildlife security. The way the partnerships performed these governance roles can be explained through the four faces of power, which reveal BLF's compulsory power and AET's institutional power. Nevertheless, the partnerships have only partially managed to bridge conflicting conservation and development discourses illustrating that the concept of sustainable development appears to hold little productive power on the ground. Overall, the article provides important insights into the contributions that partnerships can make to the SDGs, but also their limitations.

For several decades, both academics and practitioners have fiercely debated how to reconcileconservation and development objectives. In Sub-Saharan Africa, efforts to align biodiversityconservation and livelihood goals have triggered a shift from pure protected area approaches toa hybrid scenario, including diverse partnership arrangements, that consider livelihood needsof communities neighboring protected areas. These partnerships often include tourism toprovide income and jobs. The future of the Amboseli landscape in Kenya has been an integralpart of these debates, since it has faced long-lasting conservation and development challenges.Many initiatives, often in the form of partnership arrangements, have tried to address thesechallenges. By using the Sustainable Livelihood Framework (SLF) and a set of indicators tomeasure the contributions to conservation, we examine two of these partnerships - the AmboseliEcosystem Trust (AET) and Big Life Foundation (BLF)- with the aim of understanding theextent to which they contribute to addressing these challenges. Data were collected usingdocument analysis, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, non-participant observation,and informal conversations. Findings show that both AET and BLF have been able to addressdirect drivers of biodiversity loss (such as human wildlife conflicts, poaching, unplannedinfrastructural developments) and - to a much lesser extent - the indirect drivers, such as povertyand land subdivision. Through the workings of both partnerships, more community membershave gained access to specific community capital assets, through employment opportunities andother monetary incentives and education. However, it is not clear if and how the livelihoodbenefits transfer to real and long-term support for wildlife conservation.

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