Challenging conventional mindsets and disconnects in conservation: the emerging role of ecoagriculture in Kenya's landscape mosaics

Innovative approaches such as ecoagriculture that integrate increased agricultural productivity, ecosystem conservation and improved rural livelihoods in the face of declining land sizes, land use changes and increase in population are visualized as providing opportunities for sustaining resource productivity both for current and future generations. It is hypothesized that agricultural landscapes can be designed more creatively to allow for these multiple functions of agriculture by integrating biodiversity conservation and enhanced ecosystem services management through a number of strategies. This working paper provides a synthesis of the results of this scoping study undertaken in four Kenyan agricultural landscape mosaics (Taita Hills, Ndakaini/Muranga South, Mathioya/Muranga, and Lari) to identify and evaluate ecoagriculture innovations, strategies and activities. In Kenya like in other East African countries, these practices however, are ad hoc, not readily available to a wider audience and are individual -based. Such innovations continuously evolve but their impacts and constraining factors are seldom documented and localized. The scoping study reveals that ecoagriculture practices are diverse, have been evolving over space and time and thrive because of various motivating factors. Farmers’ adoption of particular technologies was basically influenced by returns within a short-term planning horizon as well as the tradeoffs they have to make. Extension services and facilitation by the government was also cited as inadequate. The study did not provide an exhaustive measurement of the spatial and temporal spread of those innovations in both agriculturally homogenous and relatively heterogeneous landscapes, however it was found that motivational factors that shape design, adoption, adaptation and implementation of ecoagriculture innovations are influenced by a number of external and internal factors. The results of this study may inform Kenya’s Strategy for the Revitalization of Agriculture by pointing to the need for innovative mechanisms for extension service provision, better marketing support and incentives for collective action to increase agricultural productivity, maintain biodiverse landscapes and improve livelihoods of the rural poor.

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