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the time of this fieldwork, MoEF was still engaging the Public Procurement and Regulatory Authority and the Treasury to develop policies guiding this.
So we realized that if the government can procure green, it will influence the manufacturing in the private sector to manufacture green products (Senior Staff, MoEF, Nairobi 09/2019).
It boils down to who funds the whole environmental agenda in Kenya. For example, according to information from my respondents, this plan is entirely donor-funded. This means that donor ideas are hugely borrowed and used in Kenya. The ideas influence contexts in which specific trains of thought are built to align with where money will come from.
So you will find that any proposal or strategy that we’re developing will align with some of those principles (Senior Staff, FES, Nairobi 09/
2020).
External actors also use agendas frames to ensure that their plan can be accepted in the Kenya political discourse and for the ideas to gain legitimacy. Talking to certain politicians enables this because they make it a political agenda once they endorse the idea. In this way, it is an easy sell to the electorate. They take it as their vision of development which the country desperately needs. In one of my interviews, the respondent working for an international organization noted,
‘and the north is very smart in trying to look at who is influential and who they can target.’ The influential people, according to him, also work very closely with high-ranking politicians. If you can convince them of the ideas behind your frame, it’s straightforward to sell that idea in the different policies, plans, and programs you have at the country level. And the documents have been very fundamental in the way in which green futures ideas have been received.
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prosperity that African leaders need (Strategic Vision 2020-2030 | African Wildlife Foundation, n.d.). As noted earlier, for most leaders, it is what can be shown to the public members during political campaigns that matter most to them. It is easier to point at an infrastructure project developed than to point at an environment conserved, and therefore the narrative of achieving both remains a pipe dream. This is better explained because environmental losses are compensated after an infrastructure project has been developed.
Kenyan leaders in the past who have performed well in the environmental conservation arena have not made it far in the political stage. This is because a majority of the voters are never impressed by such, and history has shown this very well. In the 1997 general election, Wangari Maathai, an internationally acclaimed environmentalist, contested as a president to dislodge the then-president Moi. However, a famous columnist had bad news for the professor, who would clinch the Nobel Prize for Peace seven years later. He argued that the political environment was very hostile and winning would be reserved for those who were good at scheming, and an individual’s credentials would not matter. This was true as Maathai came a distant 13th out of 15 candidates in that election.
I define compensation as payments or any kind of restitution that is rewarded to beneficiaries of economic services or agents of the ecosystem to offset foregone privileges to environmental benefits. Compensation is essential because, as much as large-scale infrastructure projects have a significant contribution to cultural, economic, and social growth, their impact on the ecological system cannot be underestimated. There is an increasing recognition of the consequences large-scale infrastructure projects like the railway have on the natural environment, more specifically on the rural and remote areas where they pass with a sparse and l who are marginalized and marginalized climatic conditions (Nyumba et al., 2021; Swallow et al., n.d.)
Previously exclusionary conservation has been criticized for trade-offs between conservation and social development goals. Several studies argue for and against negative social impacts of protected areas in different parts of the world, and the scope and characteristics of these impacts.
As a result of these studies, there have been debates among development and conservation practitioners and those in academia. Consequently, several international finance and aid organizations supporting conservation have adopted principles, policies, and programs that address the rights of local people and mechanisms available to redress conservation-related displacement. A good number of policies advocate for fair, timely, and adequate compensation
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for all the assets that are lost. The guidelines also call for supportive rehabilitation strategies so that those affected can attain a pre-invention level of well-being (Rantala et al., 2013).
The current approach to ecological matters in Kenya is reactionary. This is whereby the environment is damaged due to economic growth by the executive and other actors and afterward compensating for the damaged environment. The executive, which is part of the government as an actor, plays a significant role in exacerbating environmental problems in Kenya. These problems in Kenya can be understood adequately only when we recognize that different actors contribute to, are affected by, or seek to resolve, environmental issues at different scales. In this case, I look at the government as a massive contributor to the ecological problems it aims to resolve (Bryant & Bailey, 2005).
In this section, I examine how losses related to the environment are handled by the executive, whether the compensation offered is sufficient and if it is usually done. Protecting the environment and natural resources rests with the national government, which should establish tools to achieve sustainable development. It is a requirement that an EIA is conducted before projects can commence. EIA is an environmental management tool aiming at identifying environmental problems and providing solutions to prevent or mitigate these problems to acceptable levels and contribute to achieving sustainable development (Muigua, n.d.). Where prevention and mitigation are completely not practical, restorations then come in. EIA presents one of the actors’ tools to reimagine how environmental futures will look. By doing this assessment, the report done by ecological consultants on behalf of project proponents looks at the vision the specific project has, especially from the economic perspective, and looks at how this impacts the surrounding environment at present and in the long run. Before the project commences, the project proponent must government the project's likely impacts on the environment. After that, they have to show the measures they have systematically put in place to ensure that those impacts are taken care of. While this is usually the case, the study argues that, in a way, it reshapes the kind of green futures which then materializes differently. Projects implemented by the government undergo Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA). For example, institutions such as KETRACO constructing large-scale electricity transmission lines does this. Still, the process and the outcome that The study argues end up materializing the economic vision. In contrast, the environmental vision is constantly a battlefield, and the vision keeps deeming as the country steadily steps into the future.
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We normally pay KWS conservation fee; they call it conservation fee, but it is like let me call it okay Wildlife Act calls it conservation fee, but EMCA calls it restoration fee because it is money for restoring the damage that the KETRACO project has had in the park (Senior Staff, KETRACO, Nairobi 11/2020).
In an interview with a senior environmental expert at KETRACO, I noted that different government institutions had other names that they used to refer to the fee paid due to the damaged environment. Since these institutions had various labels, the institutions that harm the environment don’t focus on framing it. For them, as long as they can find their way to achieve the project they intend to implement, that is good enough. The naming doesn’t change anything in any way. Why would different government agencies frame it differently to include the different frames of names in the legal framework, such as the Forest Act and the Wildlife Act?
This is part of making things blurry by specific actors who tend to benefit from such ways of framing. With conflicts between the two government agencies in terms of who should bear the most significant responsibility in restoring the damaged ecosystem, the economic activities go on unstopped. At the same time, conservation debates still take center stage. There has been an overlap in mandates of the two government agencies in the past, and this is nothing new (to insert evidence on overlapping mandates of KFS and KWS).
KWS and KFS are primarily involved in protecting gazetted protected areas such as the forest reserve and the national reserve. The two agencies are concerned with forest and wildlife resources generally. In as much as the linkage between institutions has been identified as a critical factor in the system of governance of the environment both across levels and within the same levels (Robinson & Kagombe, 2018). The study argues that there exists little difference in the roles the two institutions play and note that this lack of clarity plays a well-intended role not known or well understood by the public- that of making every action unclear—mandates of KFS and KWS in restoring the damaged environment during the construction of large-scale infrastructure projects.
KWS calls it conservation fee, KFS calls it compensation for materials, it is not buying, it is compensation for materials where materials are the trees which will be damaged (Senior Staff, KETRACO, Nairobi 11/2020).
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This approach assumes that compensation alone is enough to achieve the environmental targets, thus completing the win-win narrative. I, however, argue that this will be difficult to achieve and suggest an ecological compensation approach that is target-based. This would be most effective when developed as a coordinated jurisdictional policy, with both net jurisdictional outcomes set and improvement/Maintenance compensation ratios calculated at the outset (Simmonds et al., 2020).
My empirical evidence agrees that institutions with mandates to safeguard the environment largely remain unsuccessful whenever there is a conflict with other institutions with different assignments. The environment is given a secondary role in the hierarchy of decision-making by the government (Bryant & Bailey, 2005). The study shows that corruption and irregular dealings are factors that, to a large extent, have affected the compensation of Kenyans who have to give away their lands for the construction of large-scale infrastructure projects. During the process of payment, some lose out. Those who have no title to the lands they have called their own cannot be compensated. Some of the lands have also always been grabbed by powerful politicians or those with political connections. During the compensation process, local citizens realize that the lands they have been living in are not theirs. The method of payment also takes a long in several cases. This affects communities because livelihood is denied at this particular period. In many instances, the government of Kenya has been accused of neglecting the community. Government bureaucracies have left many people suffering. Most of it has left the local community members without anywhere to go and raise their complaints, and while at it, their visions of the future are constantly deemed and the green visions deemed as well. The government promises to pay the community, and for this reason, there is always minimal resistance. Once the land is acquired, the government makes an about-turn, and most community members lose out.
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7 UNMAKING GREEN FUTURES? INSTITUTIONS AS LEGITIMIZATION TOOL But now the reality is that you know what is there on paper and what
happens (Senior Staff, KETRACO, Nairobi 11/ 2020).
This senior staff member who has worked for the government for slightly over two decades expresses his fears on the practicalities of institutions that are supposed to safeguard the environment. Being a trained environmental scientist, he contends that Kenya has a progressive legal and institutional framework but argues that the situation is quite different when you hit the ground. It is difficult for institutions to operate independently without political interference.
This is even though the government and the people of Kenya have shown an awareness of the environmental challenges facing the country. The challenges manifest in several ways, such as increased drought and flooding, land degradation, and pollution. This has seen a lot of effort consistently put into ensuring the future is sustainable. In the following, I look at the institutions behind the visions of green development, how they are created, the roles they perform, and the possible challenges and complexities they face in materializing green futures. The study argues that the current institutional arrangements reflect a well-organized network by actors at different levels who already have a particular kind of future in mind. They would like to see this future reflected in Kenya’s development discourse. The institutions, therefore, play a role in legitimizing such visions, which have little to do with the ordinary citizen. Since these green development concepts bring along finances, I attempt to show that institutional arrangements also assist in attracting funds from the donor.