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Land, livelihoods and belonging: negotiating change and anticipating LAPSSET in Kenya’s Lamu county

Chome, Ngala

Land, livelihoods and belonging: negotiating change and anticipating LAPSSET in Kenya’s Lamu county Thumbnail


Authors

Ngala Chome



Abstract

To attract investments in mineral extraction, physical infrastructure and agricultural commercialization over a vast swathe of Northern Kenya, national politicians and bureaucrats are casting the area as being both abundant with land and resources, and as, conversely, ‘backward’, ‘unexploited’ and ‘empty’. Drawing on evidence from Lamu County, and focusing on the planned Lamu Port and South Sudan Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) corridor, this article contends that such high-modernist and ‘new frontier’ discourses are usually complicated by the realities on the ground. Based on common perceptions about land and ethnicity, and how these are intertwined with the politics of belonging and redistribution, these realities exemplify complex economies of anticipation – through which networks of patronage, alliance, and mobilization are being created or entrenched in advance of major investments. This article argues that it is these anticipations – more than official designs – that will determine the future direction of LAPSSET, especially in respect to who will get what, when and how, within its promised prosperous future.

Citation

Chome, N. (2020). Land, livelihoods and belonging: negotiating change and anticipating LAPSSET in Kenya’s Lamu county. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 14(2), 310-331. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2020.1743068

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 4, 2020
Online Publication Date Mar 17, 2020
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date Mar 26, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Journal of Eastern African Studies
Print ISSN 1753-1055
Electronic ISSN 1753-1063
Publisher British Institute in Eastern Africa
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 14
Issue 2
Pages 310-331
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2020.1743068

Files

Published Journal Article (Advance online version) (2.3 Mb)
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.





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