A Three-Pronged ESG Perspective on Collaboration in Coastal Kenya: Part 1
Where Conservation Meets Complexity
Let us be honest from the outset: the hardest part of running a conservancy in Kenya is not the wildlife. It is not the ecology, or the fundraising, or even the poaching. The hardest part is the people. It is the meetings that run for hours without resolution. The community elder who wants to know what happened to last year’s benefit-sharing payment. The government official whose mandate overlaps with three other agencies. The investor who wants clear timelines in a landscape where nothing moves in straight lines.
This is what a Stakeholder Engagement Plan (SEP) is really for. Not a box-ticking exercise for a donor report; not a glossy PDF filed and forgotten. A genuine SEP is a living commitment to navigate the human complexity that sits beneath every conservation success story in Kenya’s coastal belt.
In Kwale and the wider coastal region, conservancies operate within a dense web of actors – government agencies, community institutions, civil society organizations, traditional authorities, and private investors – each with competing priorities and legitimate claims on the same landscape. Approximately 65% of Kenya’s wildlife exists outside formal protected areas, on community and private land. That one statistic explains everything. It tells you that conservation in Kenya cannot be imposed from above; it must be negotiated from within. And negotiation requires structure, legal grounding, and people who understand both.
A Brief History: From Fortress to Partnership
Kenya’s conservancy movement did not emerge from a policy meeting in Nairobi. It grew, slowly and sometimes painfully, out of the recognition that the old model of conservation – the fort, the fence, the ranger with a gun – was failing communities and failing wildlife alike.
The late 1990s ‘Parks Beyond Parks’ initiative by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) was the turning point. It catalysed a shift from fortress conservation to participatory conservation, acknowledging what communities along the coast had always known: that the people living alongside wildlife are either its greatest allies or its most persistent threat. The choice depends almost entirely on whether they benefit.
Along the coast, this evolution led to the formation of the Pwani Ecosystem Conservancies Foundation (PECFO); a landscape-level body established after years of consultation to unify conservancies across Kwale, Kilifi, Lamu, Tana River, and Mombasa. Today, PECFO represents a network of 19 conservancies covering millions of acres and thousands of households. That scale is both its strength and its greatest challenge. The more people in the tent, the harder it is to hold the tent together.
Yet from the beginning, this model has carried a central tension: conservation success depends on community participation, but community priorities are shaped by the immediate realities of earning a living, feeding a family, and securing land that has often been contested for generations. Any SEP that does not reckon honestly with that tension is not worth the paper it is written on.
The ESG Lens: A Framework, Not a Formula
I will be the first to admit, as well as my colleague Marvlyne, that ESG is not something you will come out to talk about – and it will flow easily from your mouth to people’s ears. In fact, her and I both have written quite a lot on the subject. Yet, it remains a term that even community leaders hear and think, “Oh, another way for money to be siphoned from us.”
The language of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) has moved from investor boardrooms into conservation planning – and rightly so. It offers a coherent framework for thinking about what conservancies must deliver and to whom.
Environmental goals are the most visible: biodiversity protection, habitat preservation, ecosystem health. Social dimensions are the most contested: community livelihoods, land rights, cultural heritage, equitable benefit-sharing. Governance is the least glamorous but arguably the most foundational: transparent decision-making, grievance mechanisms, accountability structures, and institutional legitimacy.
In coastal Kenya, these three pillars are not theoretical constructs. They are negotiated every day. An initiative that nails the environmental targets but ignores social realities will face resistance, sabotage, or outright rejection. One that promises social benefits without governance structures to deliver them will collapse under the weight of unmet expectations. PECFO’s efforts to establish grievance redress mechanisms across its conservancy network is a concrete example of governance as a survival strategy, not a compliance requirement.
Prong One: Government Stakeholders
Kenya Wildlife Service
KWS sits at the apex of wildlife governance in Kenya, mandated under the Wildlife Conservation and Management Act, No. 47 of 2013 (WCMA) to conserve and manage wildlife across public, private, and community land. That last category matters enormously for conservancies. The WCMA explicitly recognises wildlife conservation as a legitimate form of land use on community land, mandates equitable benefit-sharing with communities who bear the costs of living alongside wildlife, and establishes County Wildlife Conservation and Compensation Committees as formal bodies for resolving human-wildlife conflict and ensuring community voices reach the institutional table.
In practice, however, the relationship between KWS and communities is more complicated. Communities frequently perceive KWS as enforcement-heavy – focused on protecting wildlife from people rather than protecting people’s livelihoods from wildlife. The gap between what the WCMA promises and what communities experience on the ground is often wide. A well-designed SEP must map that gap honestly and build mechanisms to close it; whether through joint patrols, rapid compensation processing, or regular community liaison structures with KWS field staff.
Kenya Forest Service
The Kenya Forest Service (KFS) governs the forest ecosystems that are inseparable from conservancy landscapes along the coast; mangroves, coastal forests, and critical biodiversity corridors that connect protected areas. Its mandate is anchored in the Forest Conservation and Management Act, 2016, which allows for the formation of Community Forest Associations (CFAs) as a formal mechanism for communities to co-manage gazetted forests alongside KFS.
The governance challenge here is real. KFS and KWS mandates frequently overlap, and without coordinated planning, conservancies can find themselves caught between two sets of regulations, two chains of command, and two sets of reporting requirements. Where inter-agency collaboration works, it enables holistic ecosystem management. Where it breaks down, communities pay the price in confusion, delay, and lost opportunity.
National and County Governments
Beyond KWS and KFS, the Constitution of Kenya, 2010 devolves significant land and resource governance powers to the 47 county governments. In Kwale and the wider coast, county governments are among the most consequential actors for conservancies. They control land-use planning, local development agendas, and – crucially – they sit within the communities that conservancies serve.
Article 174 of the Constitution recognises the right of communities to manage their own affairs and further their own development. For conservancy practitioners and their legal advisors, this provision is a powerful foundation on which to insist that county governments treat conservancies not as competitors to development but as a form of it; one that delivers employment, tourism revenue, ecosystem services, and climate resilience.
Prong Two: Conservancy Networks
Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association
The Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association (KWCA) is the national voice of Kenya’s over 160 conservancies, covering millions of hectares and representing thousands of community households. Its role within an SEP is primarily governance-oriented: it bridges the gap between grassroots conservancy experience and national policy, ensuring that what communities learn on the ground informs what lawmakers debate in Nairobi.
KWCA’s recent work in developing investment prospectuses, carbon credit guides, and youth engagement strategies reflects a maturing understanding that conservancies must deliver tangible economic value if they are to survive politically and financially. Their 2024 Annual Report highlights progress in policy influence, conservancy governance, and strategic partnerships – all of which directly inform how SEPs are structured and what they must deliver to retain legitimacy.
Pwani Ecosystem Conservancies Foundation
At the landscape level, PECFO operationalizes this national vision across the coast. It builds governance structures within member conservancies, coordinates stakeholder engagement across the landscape, supports livelihoods and enterprise development, and serves as a trusted intermediary between communities, government agencies, and external investors.
PECFO’s strength lies in its local legitimacy – it emerged from years of consultation rather than being imposed from outside. Its challenge is sustainability: as a relatively young organization, it must continuously secure funding, build internal capacity, and hold the trust of communities who have often been disappointed by previous conservation initiatives. For any SEP operating in PECFO’s landscape, an early and honest relationship with PECFO is not optional; it is the entry point.
Prong Three: The Community – Not Just a Beneficiary
Ownership, Participation and Real Power
Here is something that gets said frequently in conservation circles but rarely acted upon: the community is not a stakeholder. The community is the principal. This is not just a philosophical position; it is a legal one.
The Community Land Act, No. 27 of 2016 gives communities the right to formally register their ancestral and customary lands as collective property. Once registered, that land cannot be converted to another use without the community’s informed consent, expressed through its elected land management structures. This fundamentally changes the power dynamics of conservancy establishment. A community that has registered its land under the CLA holds a legal instrument that no investor or government agency can simply override. The conservancy model, at its best, is the CLA in action – community land governed by community institutions for community benefit, with conservation as one of the primary land uses.
Community conservancies are structured as democratic institutions with locally elected boards. But democracy on paper and democracy in practice are different things. Communities are not monolithic. They include pastoralists and farmers, youth and elders, women who bear the highest costs of human-wildlife conflict and men who dominate board meetings. An SEP that treats ‘the community’ as a single actor will miss the internal fault lines that, if ignored, become the cracks through which conservancy efforts collapse.
The Challenges That Cannot Be Papered Over
In Kwale, the challenges facing community stakeholders are particularly acute. Land tenure insecurity remains pervasive – a 2025 survey found that 72% of residents in some areas lack formal land documentation, leaving them exposed to land-grabbing by developers and speculators. Historical marginalization creates deep-seated suspicion of external actors, including conservancy promoters, however well-intentioned. And competing land uses – mining, tourism, agriculture, infrastructure development – create constant pressure on the same land that conservancies depend on.
Human-wildlife conflict is not an abstract conservation challenge. It is a farmer watching a crop destroyed overnight. It is a family losing livestock that represents their entire savings. It is a woman too afraid to collect firewood after dark. Until the compensation mechanisms guaranteed under the WCMA are delivered promptly and fairly, community support for conservation will always be conditional. And rightly so.
What Genuine Community Engagement Looks Like?
The difference between genuine engagement and performative engagement is relatively simple to describe and enormously difficult to execute. Genuine engagement means that community members help design the conservancy’s management plan, not just endorse one that was drafted elsewhere. It means that benefit-sharing formulas are negotiated transparently, with communities able to see the financial model. It means that grievance mechanisms are real and accessible – not a hotline number on a noticeboard in a language that half the community does not read.
It also means going where people are. Town hall meetings favor the articulate and the already-engaged. Reaching pastoralists on seasonal migration routes, women managing household economies, or young people who have never attended a community meeting requires deliberate outreach strategies. This is where community paralegals, local civil society organizations, and trusted intermediaries play an indispensable role.
This is the first of a 2 part article on Stakeholder Engagement Plans, what they are and how they impact the conservancy work in Kenya, especially at the Coast. Join us next week as we take a look at the legal aspects, as well as the future of SEPs in conservancy life and work.
Useful Links:
Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS): https://www.kws.go.ke/
Kenya Forest Service (KFS): https://www.kenyaforestservice.org/
Pwani Ecosystem Conservancies Foundation (PECFO): https://pwaniconservancies.co.ke/our-story/
Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association (KWCA): https://kwcakenya.com/
