Unevenness in scale mismatches: Institutional change, pastoralist livelihoods, and herding ecology in Laikipia, Kenya

•Mobility has been limited by territorialization, conflict, and governance reform.•Historical institutional changes have constrained adaptation to drought and markets.•The biophysical basis of access and livestock species influences novel strategies.•Changes in reciprocity and relations have shaped livelihoods and conservation outcomes.•CBC trusts are rooted in contrasting scales for wildlife and herding ecology. This paper focuses on how political, economic, and biophysical factors shape institutions that mediate how livelihoods and ecological processes align and interact at Koija, a pastoralist group ranch in Mukogodo Division, Laikipia, Kenya. While there is currently a high-profile emphasis on landscape conservation and maintenance of wildlife mobility in East Africa, pastoralist herding range fragmentation is less often considered within conservation planning or assessments of ecological change. To address this, we asked, how have institutional changes interacted with the alignment of livestock husbandry livelihoods and ecological dynamics? We identified institutional changes that formed due to state intervention during the colonial and post-independence eras, and recent changes that have occurred due to privatized wildlife conservation. We then used ethnographic methods to analyze how these changes have interacted with biophysical conditions and herder agency to shape current livelihoods. We found that recent barriers to seasonal range access have occurred due to policies on private conservation ranches, conflicts between pastoralists in surrounding areas, and recent conservation interventions. While pastoralist households have adapted their livelihood strategies within these constraints on mobility, livelihoods have also been impacted by complex interactions with markets, changes in herding institutions, relations with conservation actors, ecological conditions of currently accessed sites, and biophysical factors related to livestock species. Bringing together political ecology and social-ecological systems literatures, we conclude that efforts to align institutions and ecological processes in favor of wildlife conservation overlook the current institutional and ecological basis of livelihoods and, in so doing, perpetuate a historically-rooted scalar mismatch between pastoralist livestock mobility and ecological variability.