Climate-related conservation and mitigation efforts are engendering the displacement of communities in southern Kenya, a researcher at the University of Toronto says - a process sometimes described as "green colonialism."
Kariuki Kirigia, an assistant professor in the School of the Environment and the African Studies Centre in the Faculty of Arts & Science, is developing a research project that examines how land documents - including maps, title deeds and leases - are being used in ways that contribute to land dispossession among the Maasai people.
"Challenges such as climate change are forcing communities to change their relationship with the land, often through capitalist mechanisms such as financing for biodiversity or carbon credits, which are alienating land from communities," says Kirigia.
Kirigia's research project - supported by a BRN IGNITE grant, offered by the Black Research Network, a U of T institutional strategic initiative - aims to avert land loss in Narok County. Building on previous ethnographic research and long-term relationships cultivated in Maasailand, Kirigia intends to use the findings to hold workshops among Maasai communities to equip landowners and activists to challenge land-grabbing done in the name of conservation.
In nearly all of Narok County, formerly communal land has been subdivided into plots for private ownership - mostly in the last two decades. Once land is subdivided, individual owners are supposed to receive title deeds. However, many rightful landowners have not been issued their deeds, effectively dispossessing them.
In addition, local elites often collude with land surveyors to manipulate maps and cartographic information during the subdivision process - with community members often being denied access to this information.
This unequal access to information has had direct implications for green colonialism by disadvantaging communities when leasing land to create wildlife conservation areas, says Kirigia.
"Community members sometimes do not understand the terms of land-lease agreements. They are often told by community leaders that they will benefit, but they are not properly informed about what they are agreeing to."
Kirigia says landowners are urged to lease their plots to conservation projects without being fully informed of restrictions and implications for land use. This can result in their being fined for accessing conservation areas that had once been in their possession, and incurring hefty costs for infractions about which they have limited legal knowledge.
"Many of these landowners are actually losing what could be an income-generating avenue by receiving fines for accessing conservation areas that are assumed to be on their land," Kirigia says.
Conservancies are also known to offer cheap loans to community members to buy land off others and lease it to the conservancy, he adds, with landowners who refuse to cooperate often allocated lower-value parcels of land during subdivision to ensure they don't stand in the way of conservancies.
Training the next generation of researchers
Originally from Kenya, Kirigia draws on African epistemologies to address environmental justice, climate change and land rights - part of the foundations of his course: "Climate and Environmental Justice in Africa."
"Land for us functions as a library of knowledge, a space where we coexist with other forms of life, including wildlife, and a space where we connect with our ancestors through intergenerational knowledge exchange," he says.
"I take it as a responsibility to train the next generation of young people on how to continue this work of taking care of the land and fostering positive and harmonious relations with the land."
Kirigia's teaching and research is guided by preserving knowledge for the next generation, empowering communities to safeguard their rights and training future researchers to engage with cultural sensitivity while tackling emerging challenges.
Throughout this project, Kirigia collaborated with the Nashulai Maasai Conservancy, a community-owned and directed wildlife conservancy, and the Indigenous Livelihoods Enhancement Partners (ILEPA), a non-governmental organization in Narok County that educates communities on land governance and protection (ILEPA and Nashulai Maasai Conservancy hosted two of Kirigia's master's students who conducted fieldwork for the project in Narok County in May and June 2025).
"[Working] collaboratively with local organizations, we consider the work we do as knowledge co-production to ensure that the knowledge we generate through research is also disseminated within the communities," Kirigia says.
