Description
Water grabbing has emerged as a conceptual and empirical tool to examine water control across multiple scales. The concept gained scholarly attention as large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) targeted agriculturally viable lands, often with direct water access suitable for irrigation. These processes redefine local water allocation and access, enabling water grabbing for commercial actors. While traditional literature links water grabbing to LSLAs driven by global trends, infrastructure, and national agendas, we offer a complementary lens, and arguing local dynamics in drought settings can be as influential as global and national processes in leading to water grabs. We empirically explore this by focusing on recent droughts in Kenya’s Lake Naivasha region, a major horticultural and floricultural hub in Kenya, examining how commercial farmers, smallholders, and pastoralists compete for scarce water to cope with drought. We highlight the unintended consequences of local coping strategies, where each actor strives to sustain livelihoods, inadvertently contributing to water grabs and reinforcing unequal power relations. By doing this, we conceptualise “resilience” as a form of water appropriation and demonstrate the direct relationship between resilience capacities and water grabbing.
