Land, natural resources and the state in Kenya’s second republic

Abstract

Across the African continent, various rural populations are currently embroiled in a wide range of struggles that foreground rights of access, control, and ownership of land and natural resources. Investigating such struggles in the Kenyan context, this chapter examines the provisions of the 2010 constitution that formally seek to elevate collective forms of land and resource tenure to a status legally equivalent to that enjoyed by their public and private counterparts. In doing so, the substance of these provisions is juxtaposed with ongoing challenges to their implementation. Resultant implications of these challenges are examined for the devolution process, the fate of a new tenure category of ‘community land’, and related institutional reforms for access to and ownership of other natural resources.