Claim-making in hydrosocial spaces: The temporality of displacement around Kenya's Masinga Dam reservoir

Abstract

The political ecology of dams offers an important perspective for analysing the interplay between ecosystem change and social power dynamics in the context of modern development visions. Currently, there is a resurgence of ‘dam fever’ in Kenya under President Ruto's green growth vision, which envisages the construction of 1,000 small and large dams across the country. This article shows that, while new dams are being planned, the first wave of dam development in Kenya in the last century is not a closed historical event, but continues to generate conflicts and claim-making around reservoirs, and continues as an active dynamic in the here and now. To date, the communities affected by the cascade of five large dams on Tana River, which is currently being proposed for expansion, have not been adequately compensated for the losses they suffered between the 1960s and 1980s. This lack of compensation has reinforced the displaced communities’ rights to the submerged lands and buffer zones around the dams, even though these rights remain unrecognised within contemporary Kenyan legal frameworks. This case illustrates how the failure to provide compensation during displacement not only leads to significant loss of land, livelihoods and household assets, but also to ongoing claim-making over land and water and the contestation of the hydrosocial territory of dam reservoirs. By exploring the temporalities of infrastructure and hydrosocial spaces, this paper shows how claim-making is rooted in these temporalities, and how these temporalities result in the ongoing burden of securing one's very existence around infrastructure.