Across Laikipia County in Kenya, pastoralist communities have long lived with an uncomfortable reality: the land their livelihoods depend on has no formal map. No agreed boundaries. No shared rules for who grazes where, or how wildlife corridors are kept open. The result is mounting pressure: on soils, on grasslands, and on the relationships between communities and the wildlife that moves through their lands. 

That is beginning to change. With support from the Wyss Academy for Nature and in close collaboration with the Laikipia Conservancies Association (LCA), three community lands (Koija in Naibunga Lower Conservancy, Murupusi in Naibunga Upper Conservancy, and Lekuruki) are each developing participatory land use plans. These are not documents imposed from outside. They are frameworks built by communities, for communities, defining where conservation areas, grazing zones, wildlife corridors, and social development zones sit, and what rules govern them. 

Most of Kenya's wildlife and livestock movement happens outside formally protected areas: on community lands where the absence of clear governance creates a vacuum. Without defined boundaries, grazing pressure builds in the wrong places. Degraded land goes unrestored. Wildlife corridors narrow and fragment. Disputes over resources escalate. 

Land use planning addresses this directly. When communities agree on the rules, and when those rules are formally recognised by county government, the landscape gains a legal backbone. Restoration efforts have a framework to work within. Grazing can be managed rather than improvised. And the communities themselves become the architects of their own land governance, not recipients of someone else's plan. 

The approach underway across all three community lands is deliberately sequenced. Before any boundary is drawn or zone is delineated, communities must fully understand and formally endorse the process. This is not a formality: it is the foundation. 

In Koija, inception meetings with the Community Land Management Committee (CLMC) established a shared understanding of what land use planning involves. Professionals with expertise in governance, conservation, and development joined dedicated meetings to contribute to specialist perspectives. Age-set leaders, representatives of the community's generational groups, whose authority is rooted in Maasai cultural tradition, were engaged separately. In pastoral communities, social legitimacy is built through culture, not only through formal structures. Facilitators and CLMC members were trained to then carry the process into every village in their local language, Maa. 

The result: across Koija's six villages, 510 community members participated in Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC) meetings: 248 men and 262 women (including youth).

In Murupusi, the same structured process unfolded across nine villages, reaching 1,356 community members: 593 men and 763 women. In pastoral communities where traditional authority structures are largely male, reaching women required a separate and deliberate effort. Women's groups were engaged as a distinct stakeholder group throughout the process, and at village-level FPIC meetings, women outnumbered men in both community lands. 

In total, across Koija and Murupusi alone, 1,866 people across 15 villages have been part of the process. Both community lands have now formally endorsed the land use planning process through Special General Meetings: officially advancing to Phase 2: Boundary Delimitation, where the actual mapping of zones and corridors begins. 

Land use planning is one strand of a broader, systemic approach the Wyss Academy and LCA are developing in Naibunga. Alongside the planning process, restoration site stewardship committees are being established to govern grazing regulations specifically around areas of active rangeland restoration. And in two landscape clusters (Mayianat–Loldaiga–Olnashu and Mpala–Loisaba–Koija), a coordinated "grazing for restoration" governance model is being piloted, linking community lands and private conservancies under shared grazing agreements. 

On the ground, this is already taking shape: 3,000 semicircular bunds have been dug in Lekuruki and 1,500 in Ilngwesi. These are small, crescent-shaped earth structures that slow water runoff and give degraded grasslands the chance to recover. Land use plans provide the governance structure within which these restoration efforts can be sustained over time. 

Together, these interlocking systems (land use planning, restoration stewardship, and coordinated grazing governance) represent a model for how pastoral landscapes can be managed not just for today, but for the generations of people and wildlife that will depend on them. 

This project is implemented by the Wyss Academy for Nature in collaboration with the Laikipia Conservancies Association (LCA). Visuals credit: Laikipia Conservancies Association (LCA). 

This article was co-written by Alex Kimiri & Daria Vuistiner. Editorial work by Predrag Tripkovìc.