The Mau Forest in western Kenya is being threatened by multiple land use pressures and human activities. Damage to the forest and to human inhabitants, including Indigenous Ogiek communities, is increasingly clear, with forest and biodiversity losses, water pollution, losses to cultural ways of life, poverty and social inequalities. Interdependencies between humans and non-humans in the landscape, such as between plants, animals, rivers and the forest itself, are being obscured and damaged by dominant ways of thinking and being. These include forces such as the demand for agricultural commodities from the European Union (EU) and other regions, which is fuelling the agricultural expansion of commodities like tea.
Adjacent to the Mau Forest is Kenya’s largest tea-growing region, with extensive tea estates bordering the forest. Tea production serves as a major source of livelihood for smallholder producers. Demand for firewood needed to process the tea has caused forest degradation in the past, although this demand is currently met by large eucalyptus plantations. Previously, the tea estates were large employers, but recent introduction of mechanical harvesting has resulted in significant unemployment, negatively impacting the lives of largely female workers and local families.
The Transformative Change for Biodiversity and Equity (TCforBE) project is exploring possible sustainability transformations in agrofood systems linking the EU and its constituent countries and consumers to producer countries and landscapes. As part of this research programme, TCforBE teams from Kenya and NRI, along with other project partners, are facilitating a participatory process called ‘multi-actor social learning’. This transdisciplinary approach involves engaging different actors and forms of knowledge, including environmental sciences, environmental governance, but also relational, decolonial and more-than-human social sciences, as well as diverse local actors, communities and non-humans (e.g. plants, animals, rivers etc). Life is created by complex webs of interdependencies between humans, non-humans and inhumans, such as technologies and infrastructures. More-than-human social sciences challenges dominant ways of thinking and being by recognizing non-humans as having agency and sentience, and therefore capacities to affect or be affected.
Multi-actor social learning aims to support learning about values and different cultural philosophies as much as it is about sharing information. The process adopted involves the facilitation of a learning alliance of actors that will explore sustainability futures through learning cycles, including the use of arts-based and participatory methods. This includes efforts to break out of dominant ways of thinking and being (e.g. patriarchies and colonial modernities) to widen the possibilities for consideration.
To begin the social learning process, in November 2024, the Kenya and NRI TCforBE teams co-designed and conducted a kick-off workshop involving participants from three communities around the forest, along with government, NGO, Indigenous and research representatives. The workshop was facilitated by the Kenyan team led by Dr Joseph Hitimana and George Omondi, while the NRI team comprised Professors Valerie Nelson and Jeremy Haggar, and PhD student Niall Readfern.
The workshop built upon preceding rural imaginaries research with the three local communities around the Mau Forest landscape. This prior research included a participatory photography exercise called photovoice that enables diverse social groups to have a voice, interviews with elders and focus group discussions, and the results were shared in the social learning workshop. This included an art exhibition on senses of place, pasts-presents-futures and non-human perspectives. Participatory exercises included a ‘Parliament of Things’ exercise (a participatory role play exercise giving non-humans a voice), collage-making using photos to explore pasts, presents and feared and desired futures, as well as planning of future learning priorities and creative learning activities.
The Mau Forest Learning Alliance comprises three learning groups, with three sub-themes (agroecology, climate and biodiversity, and sustainable value chains) all selected by participants. Each group is now conducting joint research and field trips, following their agreed learning plans. All will reconvene early next year to reflect on lessons and continue the learning process. This open-ended process is designed to strengthen participants’ capacity to speculate upon plural futures and build their motivation for action, with the potential to shape decision-making and practices.
Some of the team also visited the Mau Forest landscape to experience and listen to the forest, recording forest sounds – human and non-human. Niall Readfern will be exploring Mau soundscapes in his PhD and the sounds will be shared in the next workshop. Work was also advanced to devise biodiversity and equity enterprise case studies led by Professor Haggar.
Professor Valerie Nelson said: The process generated energy and willingness amongst participants to form a learning alliance, working in a more open-ended way, to explore learning themes based on their own, diverse, priorities – priorities that all relate in some way to future nature and equity issues. The participatory exercises raised consciousness about giving voice to non-humans, expanding notions of ‘community’ in challenging contexts of intensifying agricultural export commodity production. Overall, it is not possible to predict where the process will go, but new collective capacities – cognitive and affective - are already emerging on a wider range of future Mau sustainability possibilities than hitherto.