Shadow State and the making of informal territories: Negotiating conservation and communal land reforms in the Kenyan wildlife frontier

Recent research on community-based conservation (CBC) has adapted political ecology theories to resource frontier contexts. This paper contributes to these efforts by exploring how the notion of the shadow state in CBC planning undermines the state's capacity to enforce regulations for community land reform in historical resource frontiers. This paper focuses on the CBC planning process of the Northern Rangeland Trust (NRT) in northern Kenya's wildlife frontier to illustrate the political authority of the shadow state in planning CBC interventions through community conservancies, which have led to the territorialization and commodification of communal natural resources. It analyzes the social foundations and practices of the NRT Shadow State, its informal accommodations with local intermediaries, its violent territorialization and monopolization of benefits, and how these ultimately hinder the state's ability to implement community land reforms. The paper argues that a nearly exclusive shadow state strategy of mobilizing resources from donors and global conservation networks and reorganizing institutional frameworks for the governance of natural resources are the endemic features that enable the NRT to plan and expand community conservancies in communal rangelands in Kenya's northern wildlife frontier. This process fosters informal conservation territories and governance configurations that weaken communal resource management and promote exclusionary practices on the ground. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader implications of shadow state power for community land reforms, arguing that this authority challenges regulatory agencies, limiting their ability to provide adequate oversight and enforcement of regulations for community land reforms in resource frontiers.