Violent Regulation and Social-Ecological Transformation of Wetland Ecosystems in East Africa
Final Report Abstract
The project seeked to understand the dynamics of transformation of social-ecological systems of two exemplary wetland ecosystems in East Africa, namely Lake Naivasha and Lake Baringo. The respective social-ecological systems are ecologically rich but highly fragile and they have become contested arenas in which a large number of conflicting actors negotiate various critical agendas. A number of conflicts have triggered vital changes in both social-ecological systems. The rapid expansion of agro-industries and connected to it the immigration of ten thousands of workers in the Naivasha, and the escalation of inter-community violence and the politicisation and ethnicising of resource issues in Baringo led to the search for new forms of regulation of social-ecological dynamics. Various strategies are applied to garner support for or enforce new forms of regulation of humanenvironment relations. A fundamental option in both cases for both powerful and powerless actors is to resort to structural and/or physical violence. Current social-ecological research defines violent regulation as a process in which multifarious actors resort to direct and/or structural violence to determine the regulation of deeply contested societynature interactions in favour of their own interests. Violent regulation is, therefore, both a means and an expression of social struggles that are fought around new social-ecological regimes in rapidly transforming systems. We document cross-scale dynamics of violent regulations and on conflicting modes of regulation of human-environment relations, and the use of violence in the commoditization and politicization of local modes of regulation and emergent institutions. Both perspectives converge on conceptualizing violent regulation as a negotiation process and as social and cultural practice that reflects the coupling of the social, ecological and semiotic subsystems of SES.
