Shared ground and shifting terms between humans and wildlife in Kenya's South Rift

Reflections on David Kimali's Presentation to realife's Just Landscapes Working Group. realife is greatly thankful for David sharing his insightful learning with our collective.

In Kenya's South Rift, pastoralist communities have long shared their landscape with lions, leopards and other large carnivores. It is a relationship built on generations of adaptation, negotiation and, at times, tension. But drought is changing the terms of that relationship, and not for the better.

As dry seasons lengthen and water and grazing become scarcer, the margin for coexistence narrows. Livestock are pushed into closer contact with wildlife as herders search further afield for pasture. Carnivores, facing their own pressures as prey species struggle, are drawn towards livestock as an easier target. The result is a rise in conflict at precisely the moment communities are least able to absorb the loss of an animal, whether economically or socially.

This is the backdrop to David Kimaili's research in South Rift with his colleagues at South Eastern Kenya University, Department: Sociology, Anthropology and Community Development. His work sits at an uncomfortable but important junction, conservation programmes in the region have, for years, emphasised community participation as the route to sustainable coexistence. Yet participation and impact are not the same thing. David's research asks a pointed question, does community involvement in conservation actually translate into influence over what happens on the ground, or has it become a procedural box to tick?

Community engagement methods in brief

David's approach is grounded in how communities experience this conflict day to day, not in carnivore behaviour or livestock loss statistics alone, making it more of a governance study. It asks who is in the room when decisions are made, and whether community voice actually shapes those decisions or simply legitimises choices made elsewhere.

This goes further than the consultative studies common in conservation. David's work asks a harder question, did that inclusion actually shift resource allocation, policy design, or enforcement priorities in ways communities asked for? Or did it simply confirm decisions that were already made?

What the research uncovered

The central finding that emerges from the abstract is a gap, communities are participating, but that participation is not consistently changing what happens on the ground. This is a familiar pattern in natural resource governance more broadly, but it takes on particular weight here because the stakes are so immediate. When a family loses livestock to a lion, and drought has already stretched their resources thin, the question of whether their voice carries weight in the response is not academic.

This points to a deeper issue than simply "more consultation". It suggests that trust, or the lack of it, may be doing much of the work. Communities can attend meetings and contribute input, but if the governance systems around them are not designed to be genuinely accountable to that input, participation risks becoming a formality rather than a mechanism for change.

Lessons learned

A few lessons follow naturally from this framing:

• Participation is necessary but not sufficient. Conservation programmes need mechanisms that translate community input into decisions, not just processes that document it.

• Trust is a governance variable, not a soft add-on. Where communities do not trust the institutions managing coexistence, even well-designed participatory processes may fail to deliver legitimacy or compliance.

• Climate stress changes the calculus. Drought is not a neutral backdrop. It intensifies the costs of conflict and shortens the patience communities have for governance systems that feel extractive rather than responsive.

• Coexistence is a governance outcome, not just an ecological one. Reducing conflict incidents matters, but so does whether the systems managing that conflict are seen as fair by the people living inside them.

  
  

Questions to carry forward 

David's study raises some questions worth carrying forward as we continue with the conversations on human wildlife conflict/coexistance: 

• What would it take, concretely, for community participation to shift from consultation to shared decision-making authority in these landscapes?

• How do communities themselves define trust in conservation governance, and what would rebuilding it require?

• As drought becomes more frequent under a changing climate, are current governance structures built to adapt quickly enough, or do they assume a stability that no longer exists?

• Who holds the institutions managing coexistence accountable, and to whom?

These are not questions with easy answers. But they are the right ones to be asking, particularly as climate pressures make the cost of getting coexistence governance wrong higher than ever. David's work is a useful reminder that inclusion, if it is to mean anything, has to be measured by what changes because of it, not simply by who was invited to the table.