From herding to farming under adaptation interventions in southern Kenya: A critical perspective

R. Weesie, A.K. García

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

© 2018 by the authors.Improving water supply for irrigable farming and livestock purposes in communities in Africa is an increasingly popular approach for community-based adaptation interventions. A widespread intervention is the construction of agro-pastoral dams and irrigation schemes in traditionally pastoral communities that face a drying climate. Taking the Maji Moto Maasai community in southern Kenya as a case study, this article demonstrates that water access inequality can lead to a breakdown of pre-existing social capital and former pastoral cooperative structures within a community. When such interventions trigger new water uses, such as farming in former pastoral landscapes, there are no traditional customary institutional structures in place to manage the new water resource. The resulting easily corruptible local water management institutions are a main consolidator of water access inequalities for intervention beneficiaries, where socio-economic standing often determines benefits from interventions. Ultimately, technological adaptation interventions such as agro-pastoral dams may result in tensions and a high fragmentation of adaptive capacity within target communities.
Original languageEnglish
Article number4386
JournalSustainability (Switzerland)
Volume10
Issue number12
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 23 Nov 2018
Externally publishedYes

Funding

Acknowledgments: The research in Maji Moto was part of a research project entitled Towards Inclusive Climate Change Interventions (TICCI), which was part of a programme called Conflict and Cooperation over the Management of Climate Change (CCMCC), funded by the Department for International Development (DFID) of the United Kingdom, through the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO-WOTRO). Angela Kronenburg García received support for co-writing this article from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 677140 MIDLAND). We would like to express our gratitude to the ILEPA staff for all their support during the fieldwork, especially Kimaren, Patrick, and Simon as well as his family. We also want to thank all the agro-pastoralists and pastoralists in and around Maji Moto who took the time to participate in the research. Funding: This research received no external funding. The APC was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 677140 MIDLAND), and by Utrecht University, department of Human Geography and Planning.

FundersFunder number
NWO-WOTRO
Horizon 2020 Framework Programme677140
European Research Council
Universiteit Utrecht
Department for International Development
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek

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