The story of wildlife conservation in East Africa is often told through spectacular images of beautiful scenery and the region’s charismatic animals. But seldom asked is the question about how those efforts include and impact the communities that live alongside wildlife.

At the core of Africa’s rich biodiversity are Indigenous communities, which include pastoralists and forest peoples whose ways of life and knowledge are critical to conservation.

However, these communities have historically been blamed for biodiversity loss. Pastoralists such as the Maasai are often blamed for keeping “excessive” amounts of livestock, overgrazing and land degradation.

Such tropes against African Indigenous communities linger and continue to shape conservation, which has led to strict and often punitive regulations.

My ongoing research in the Maasai Mara region of southern Kenya looks into wildlife conservancies. The region is home to the Maasai, as well as other Indigenous Peoples, and rich biodiversity. My research examines how conservancies impact local communities on whose land conservation is practised.

Read more: Tanzania’s Maasai are being forced off their ancestral land – the tactics the government uses

What are wildlife conservancies?

The decline in wildlife in Kenya led to the birth of wildlife conservancies on both community and private lands. Kenya’s 2013 Wildlife Conservation and Management Act defines a wildlife conservancy as “land set aside by an individual landowner, body corporate, group of owners or a community for purposes of wildlife conservation.”

Organizations like the Kenya Wildlife Conservation Association (KWCA) view them differently. They see conservancies as land that is not set aside, but rather managed for the well-being of wildlife and communities.

In essence, the government maintains the view of fortress conservation that entails separating humans from nature, while the KWCA imagines communities co-existing with wildlife.

At the core of wildlife conservancies is land. Land ownership largely determines the type of........

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