Violent Regulation and Social-Ecological Transformation of Wetland Ecosystems in East Africa

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Michael Bollig; Professor Dr. Patrick Sakdapolrak, since 1/2014
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 165405448

Large and small wetlands are ecologically and economically key elements of East African dryland savannahs. Within a wider ecosystem characterised by the variability of precipitation and the overall lack of water, wetlands are ecologically rich but also fragile SES. Therefore, wetland resources have become heavily contested during the past decades. The rapid expansion of agro-industries in the case of Lake Naivasha and the related immigration of tens of thousands of workers coincide with the escalation of intercommunity violence, the politisation and ethnicisation of resource issues in the case of Lake Baringo. The project seeks to understand how the two wetland SES are currently transformed through violent forms of regulation. Violent regulation can be defined as a process in which multifarious actors resort to direct and/ or structural violence to determine the regulation of deeply contested society-nature interactions. Violent regulation is, therefore, both a means and an expression of social struggles that are fought around new social-ecological regimes in rapidly transforming SES. Consequently, the project will analyse violent regulation as a negotiation process and as social and cultural practice that reflects the coupling and re-coupling of the ecological, social and semiotic subsystems of the wetlands.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1501: Resilience, Collapse and Reorganisation in Social-Ecological Systems of East- and South Africa's Savannahs
• International Connection: Kenya, United Kingdom
• Participating Persons: Dr. Pauline von Hellermann; Dr. Kibet Ngetich
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Hans-Georg Bohle, until 1/2014 (†)