Kariuki Kirigia is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the School of the Environment and African Studies Centre at the University of Toronto. Kariuki’s research lies at the intersection of climate change, biodiversity conservation, land governance, food security, African epistemologies and pedagogies, and sustainability in Africa. He adopts engaged approaches to research working in close partnership with African indigenous communities and organizations, and African universities.
Some of your research focuses on the complexities of biodiversity in East Africa. What are some of the issues surrounding conservation efforts?
We are a faced with a unique epoch in our lives living on a planet in crisis. Biodiversity conservation is one of the imperatives in the efforts to address climate-related challenges and East Africa is one of the key biodiversity-rich regions in the world. As such, local conservation efforts are not only of local significance but also of global significance. This local-global nature of conservation in East Africa comes with complexities especially the increasingly multilayered institutional formations governing conservation.
The shift in understanding that biodiversity conservation ought not only focus on protected areas such as national parks and reserves but, importantly, that it is critical to conduct conservation on private spaces demands decentering the state as the main force driving conservation and, in turn, bring in local communities as key stewards of conservation. This shift requires changes in, among others, governance approaches and decolonizing conservation especially given the histories of devaluing African indigenous lives and livelihoods during colonial and post-independence periods.
The emergence of wildlife conservancies in Kenya and wildlife management areas (WMA’s) in Tanzania exemplifies ongoing shifts in governing conservation and African indigenous territories of life. The flows of global financial capital add further complexity to biodiversity conservation in East Africa as these flows greatly influence the conduct of conservation even with the rise of novel conservation approaches such as through the conservancies and WMAs.
Are there any solutions?
Yes, there are solutions, but these are often hindered by resistance from mainly powerful entities that seek to control African indigenous lands. For example, empowering local communities means not only ensuring fair distribution of revenues from tourism conservation but also addressing historical and ongoing land injustices. These efforts require holistic approaches to empower indigenous and local communities including support for land struggles, protection of land defenders and witnesses in court cases, access to education, awareness creation and training on land rights, and recognition and protection of African indigenous ways of life. Often, this important and simultaneously difficult and risky work is undertaken by African indigenous organizations who are deeply informed about the histories and local politics of their respective territories of life. As such, working and supporting these organizations goes a long way in moving the arc of justice towards African indigenous communities.
You’re currently working on a book Promises of Property: The Expansion of Capitalist Relations on an African Indigenous Frontier. Can you tell us a bit about it?
This book project is a culmination of long-term research that I have been carrying out mainly in Olderkesi in Narok County, southern Kenya. The book primarily investigates and discusses land reform dynamics through an ethnographic study of the politics and processes of tenure transition in the rangelands of southern Kenya that are home to the Maasai pastoralist communities. In the past several decades, the Maasai have pursued subdivision of the long-established Maasai pastoral commons to apportion private individual tenure. Concurrently, efforts to conserve wildlife and rich biodiversity have been underway through the establishment of a wildlife conservancy in the area. I frame land subdivision and wildlife conservation as ‘making property’ to argue that land privatization in Olderkesi fosters the penetration of global capitalist forces on an African indigenous frontier, a site that will increasingly have to contend with the realities and politics of a planet in crisis. Ultimately, I reflect on the promises of land reforms enacted through liberalisation of tenure in the African postcolonial context to speculate on the possible futures for African indigenous communities in the face of unrelenting neoliberal conservation politics.
Your graduate course ENV1113HS: Social Sustainability: Environmental Justice in Africa explores environmental justice in the African context. What topics are covered?
This graduate course is in its second year of offering, and it is one of the courses I have gained incredible fulfilment teaching both owing to the topics covered and the interest and passion from the students. In sum, the course sets out to critically explore environmental justice through rigorous engagement with African philosophies such as Ubuntu, that are anchored in African ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies, African feminisms, and imaginaries of African futures. Among the topics covered include African colonial histories and afterlives of colonialism, racial capitalism, historical and ongoing land injustices, climate change and climate justice, migration, African diasporic experiences, decolonization, biodiversity conservation, resource governance and conflicts, and environmental justice movements. This year the course participating in the Sandbox program, an experiential-learning program, where students are working in partnership with an external organization (the Clean Air Task Force) to generate solutions to real-world challenges and questions identified by and/or relevant for the organization.
What do you hope students take away from the course?
At the end of the course, the aim is to ensure students have gained in-depth understanding and appreciation of the complex nature of reading and writing about environmental justice in Africa, the value of geographies of knowledge and onto-epistemic decolonization, the need for collaboration and collective action in addressing environmental challenges, and skills to design robust theoretical frameworks for studying environmental justice in Africa and beyond. In sum, it is ‘seeing’ environmental justice in the world from Africa.
Are you teaching any undergraduate courses?
I currently teach “AFR460 – Climate Change, Food Security, and Sustainability in Africa” offered in the Fall semester within the African Studies Centre. This course focuses on the nexus between climate change, food security, and sustainability in Africa and introduces students to key debates and evolving realities about Africa’s position in the world as seen through, for example, foreign land acquisitions and investments, and adaptation and mitigation strategies for improved food and livelihood security. This course is quite fitting especially for students in African Studies and School of the Environment, as well as other disciplines in the Arts and Sciences such as Anthropology.
Thinking about the current political climate and the claw back of environmental regulations and treaties, what worries you?
These are critical times that clearly show the global nature of conservation networks through which capital and ideas flow. The halt in USAID funding stands out as the most immediate of concerns for conservation in East Africa. Beyond the immediate impact of job losses, I am concerned by possible loss of funding to important African indigenous organizations and important projects led by or focused on empowering indigenous and local communities. This gap might provide an opportunity for powerful entities to corruptly alienate and expropriate land and key territories of life from communities. On the other hand, this could be the time to foster meaningful participation and inclusion of communities in conservation beyond what may be externally-driven projects that grant more control and influence to ‘conservation’s friends in high places’ as George Holmes (2011) put it.
What do you like to do outside of research and teaching?
It is difficult to disentangle research from my life. That said, I enjoy being in nature and listening to nature sounds; travelling and learning about new cultures and ways of life (as we say in Kiswahili, “kutembea kwingi kuona mengi” - “one who travels sees (learns) a lot”), and learning new languages.