Land tenure, land use and sustainability in Kenya: towards innovative use of property rights in wildlife management

The sustainable management biological diversity is a major concern of the international community which now realizes that this diversity is being eroded at an alarming rate due to consumptive uses of species as well as the excessive alteration of habitats owing to human activities such as cultivation, pastoralism and urbanization. The increase in human population around the world also accelerates species extinction as such population exerts more pressure on available resources.

Private property rights regimes are believed to create incentives for the management of resources. They could, however, also encourage the erosion of resources. In evaluating the role of property rights in wildlife management, it is imperative to critically examine the laws that have been put in place for the protection of biodiversity and the rights impacting on management activities. Our argument here is that private property rights and current wildlife conservation and management laws and policies in Kenya fail to provide the solution to wildlife biodiversity erosion partly because of their preoccupation with a monolithic system of property ownership favouring the state and individuals and neglecting communities and/or groups.

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