Chapter 7
In: Agricultural Intensification, Environmental Conservation, Conflict and Co-Existence at Lake Naivasha, Kenya
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Abstract
Lake Naivasha is a vibrant agro-industrial hub specialised in the production of cut flowers for the European market. The industry’s highly sophisticated specialisation goes along with close economic connections between the production site in Kenya, and trade centres, supermarkets and consumers in Europe. These economic connections between local and global scales underwent profound changes in recent years, which in turn had far-reaching consequences for the transformation of the sensitive social-ecological system of the Lake Naivasha area. The paper addresses the question of how local processes of transformation resonate with the specific embeddedness of the flower industry in cross-scalar relations. It investigates these relations from an economic-geography perspective, i.e., through the conceptual lens of value chains, production networks and marketisation. These cross-scalar connections are considered as “vertical”, whereas the relations within the social-ecological system are considered as “horizontal”. Building upon these concepts, the paper highlights the intersection of horizontal and vertical relations by arguing that the flower industry and social-ecological transformation in the Lake Naivasha area are increasingly influenced by vertical entanglements, i.e., changing market relations and a growing awareness on the part of European consumers of the conditions under which the flowers are produced. The paper concludes that the various aspects of marketisation and the emergence of a new market order are major drivers of change in the flower industry and its impact on the social ecology of the Lake Naivasha area.