MOBILITY, MARGINALITY AND TENURE TRANSFORMATION IN KENYA: EXPLORATIONS OF COMMUNITY PROPERTY RIGHTS IN LAW AND PRACTICE Celestine Nyamu Musembi and Patricia Kameri-Mbote Abstract Community land rights were officially recognized for the first time in Kenya’s 2010 Constitution on the basis of ‘ethnicity, culture or similar community of interest’. It remains to be seen whether this will begin to reverse the trend of over-emphasis on individual tenure and sedentary agricultural land uses. Against this background, this article interrogates the various narratives around defining ‘community’ that have emerged in national and local discourses on entitlement to resources. The article draws on a case study of a Kenyan community – the Ogiek in the Rift Valley – in which tenure and land use are changing rapidly and where tension exists between individual and communal tenure, and among contending visions of future community land rights. Keywords: land rights, tenure, community, land use, Rift Valley Introduction Community rights to land in Kenya have had a precarious legal existence due to a national pursuit of private, individual ownership. Since the 1950s attempts at tenure reform have emphasized formal title. Community rights over land used for purposes that are seen as incompatible with the dominant land use, namely sedentary agriculture, have been particularly precarious, for example nomadic pastoralism. Limited forms of legal recognition have been extended to some forms of communal land tenure, but these are widely viewed as ineffective, driving a push toward individual title even in the areas targeted for community tenure. The recognition of community land rights in the 2010 Constitution sought to end this legal insecurity and this provides an opportunity to reflect on:  the current legal landscape;  how extant land laws work in concrete social settings (drawing on field research conducted in East Mau in the Rift Valley); and  what narratives are behind the meanings assigned to ‘community’ in delimiting entitlement to land and land-based resources and whether they cause and/or rationalize the exclusion of some social and demographic groups. NOMADIC PEOPLES (2013) VOLUME 17, ISSUE 1, 2013: 5–32 doi: 10.3167/np.2013.170102 ISSN 0822-7942 (Print), ISSN 1752-2366 (Online)