The Contentious Political Economy of Biofuels

Media headlines and international press coverage have called attention to the Tana River Delta, a small, rural, poor region on Kenya’s eastern coast. In part, these news articles tracked the events around a court case launched by Tana villagers and nongovernmental organizations against several government agencies and a private sugar company. Why did an obscure, local court case in a remote, pastoral community draw international media attention? How did those involved in the case make their claims about the Tana Delta resonate with a wider audience? Proponents and their allies, I argue, linked Tana land-use plans to global debates over biofuels, drawing on language of food security, land tenure, and sovereignty. To explain the tactics of claim-making in the Tana Delta, I offer the hybrid theoretical lens of “contentious political economy”—bringing together contentious politics’ attention to historically based and adaptive claimmaking cycles, political economy’s interest in new markets and private authority, and political ecology’s sensitivity to geography and discourse. By appealing to the contested politics of biofuels, Tana villagers participated in the latest episode of ongoing contestation over land control and exclusion in the global South. The contentious political economy lens reveals how this otherwise marginalized region ended up at the heart of debates over food security, land rights, and resource conflicts.