AUTHOR=Santini Gabriella 

TITLE=The Community Land Act and the subdivision of Kenya’s Maasailand’s remaining commons: implications for community conservation

JOURNAL=Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice

VOLUME=Volume 15 - 2025

YEAR=2025

URL=https://www.frontierspartnerships.org/journals/pastoralism-research-policy-and-practice/articles/10.3389/past.2025.14918

DOI=10.3389/past.2025.14918

ISSN=2041-7136

ABSTRACT=The introduction of the Community Land Act (2016), heralded by Kenya’s National Land Policy under its 2010 Constitution, reignited debates around the formalisation of customary property rights, leading many Maasai group ranches to dissolve communal land into private, individualised parcels rather than register as community lands. This trend has often resulted in land enclosures and unsustainable resource use, threatening vital community-managed resources such as forests, grasslands, and wildlife. This study employs a qualitative comparative case study of two Maasai group ranches’ transition to private tenure in order to investigate local perceptions of the CLA and the factors motivating communities to move away from communal land holdings. It also examines how the two different approaches to land subdivision affect resource management and conservation outcomes. It draws from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Oloirien (Narok County) and Olgulului/Ololarashi (Kajiado County), including semi-structured interviews, household questionnaires and participant observation, conducted between 2022 and 2023 among Maasai communities, as well as a review of secondary sources. The findings reveal that Olgulului/Ololarashi, which integrated demands for private property rights with communal access and management of the commons, was able to mitigate many unintended consequences of privatisation, such as path dependency and resource fragmentation. In contrast, Oloirien’s approach led to increased land enclosures and weakened collective management. This paper argues that, in an enclosure context, conservation initiatives that allow for the continuity of customary resource management and give people a tangible stake in projects are more likely to foster a collective sense of environmental responsibility and stewardship. These insights have broader relevance for land policy and conservation strategies across African rangelands.