Land tenure and biodiversity: An exploration in the political ecology of Murang'a District, Kenya

Human Organization, Fall 2003 by Mackenzie, A Fiona D

My research in Murang'a (Mackenzie 1995) suggested that sustainable management of the soil was bound up not only with the level of wealth or poverty of the household, but also with how successfully women (with primary, and often exclusive, responsibility for agricultural production) were able to secure rights to land and labor. The research suggested that the option value (Blaikie 1989) of maintaining the soil through labor-intensive practices, such as mulching or green manuring, may decline, and that women may compromise their knowledge as farmers in the effort to meet immediate household responsibilities. Their deep and ecologically precise knowledge of a particular place may be threatened as a result of such choices. It may also be threatened as genetically uniform crops such as hybrid or composite maizes displace those crops they have bred for ecological specificity and as there is a decline in "the spaces between" (Rocheleau 1995: 12)-hedgerows, the edges of paths or roads, or areas of woodland or grass found among the cultivated plots-where women used to gather wild foods. Ritu Verma's (2001) recent research supports these observations, showing unequivocally how politically embedded are the everyday practices of soil management. In the context of Maragoli, Western Kenya, she deepens the analysis by demonstrating how people differentiated by gender, class, age, marital status, and position with respect to life-cycle, negotiate rights to land, labor (on and off the farm), and the product of labor, and how struggles concerning these rights, caught up themselves in processes of macroeconomic change, play themselves out with respect to land use and management practices.

Toward a Framework for Research

Recognizing that the relationship between land tenure and biodiversity cannot be divorced from the broader political economy,1 and with reference to the more general question concerning whose rights are secure under which tenurial regimes and how this influences land use practices associated with plant genetic diversity, the following questions are proposed to move forward research on, and conceptualization of, the relationship between people, land rights, and biodiversity. For heuristic purposes, the questions are divided into three sections: land to which individualized rights are claimed; land to which rights are held in common; and land under individual control to which there are collective rights. Discussion of the methodological issues that arise from this proposed framework follows.

Land to Which Individual Rights are Claimed

As rights of use and control of land change with increasing individualization of tenure, to what extent, if any, have people changed practices of land use that in the past may have ensured the maintenance of crop genetic diversity? To what extent do any new practices contribute to enhancing crop biodiversity? In attempts to exert individual rights to land, what tenure building practices are employed? Who can employ them? To what extent is the planting of specific crops or trees part of a strategy of tenure building? On what symbolic resources do people rely in trying to assert these rights? What are the implications of such measures for increasing biodiversity in a particular area?