From Negotiations to Adjustment: Kenya

Kenya is the largest producer of cut flowers in Africa and the leading supplier to Europe. Almost 75% of flower production comes from 25 medium to large-scale producers, with foreign-owned firms producing over 65% of the flowers at Lake Naivasha. The pressure on the lake, a Ramsar site, and its supporting ecosystem is becoming so high that trade-offs among the lake’s services are now endemic and hotly contested. Kenya is generally characterized by income disparity, increasing levels of poverty, and great pressure on the natural environment. The challenge at Naivasha is that economic growth is increasing competing demands on an ever-diminishing resource by a booming flower industry and other resource users (including farmers and pastoralists). This conflict seriously inhibits development, poverty alleviation, and healthy ecosystem function.  

The overall objective of the project is to engage and support stakeholders in developing innovative responses to these tradeoffs and pressures.  The aim is to sustain the benefits from trade and investment, which also means sustaining the natural resource base on which economic growth, livelihoods, and ecosystem services all depend. A set of stakeholder assessments being completed at Lake Naivasha focuses on issues of “access,” in contrast to a current policy agenda around “allocation” that essentially ignores a set of ecosystem services important to the poor.  WWF is also working with a private-sector certification firm on an approach that would address multiple players at a landscape scale, which could emerge as an important conceptual break with “on-farm” approaches to certification.  

Stakeholder engagement at the lake is also making an important contribution towards more participatory natural resource governance there. In Nairobi, the project helped to launch an inter-ministerial dialogue, hosted by the Ministry of Agriculture, about the relationships between smallholder agriculture, export agriculture, and rural development. WWF has also been instrumental in pushing the government to establish an inter-Ministerial Council on natural resource management issues, an initiative that for the first time includes a broader range of institutional stakeholders like the Ministry of Trade. Project partners include WWF’s East Africa Regional Program Office, SNV-Kenya, and the Tegemeo Institute.