Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Land Use Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol Are goats the new elephants in the room? Changing land-use strategies in Greater Mara, Kenya Mette Løvschal a,b,1, ⁎ , Dorthe Døjbak Håkonsson b,c,d,1 , Irene Amoke e,f a Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Højbjerg, 8270, Denmark b Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus University, Aarhus, C 8000, Denmark c Department of Management, Aarhus University, Aarhus, C 8000, Denmark d Department of Business Development and Technology, Herning, 7400, Denmark e Kenya Wildlife Trust, Nairobi, P. O. Box 86–005200, Karen, Kenya f Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association P.O. Box 984 – 20500 Narok, Kenya ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Pastoralism Land-use strategies Land privatization Dispositive Conservation policies Grasslands Goats ABSTRACT Land privatization and rapid land-use transformation are drastically reducing the pristine eco-cultural habitat across vast areas of East Africa. To avert what could become a classic tragedy of the commons, comprehensive solutions are needed. To date the conservancy model has provided a viable solution for securing long-term sustainable integration of cattle management alongside wildlife conservation. But new groundbreaking research shows that cattle numbers are stagnating and that flocks of sheep/goats are expanding on an unprecedented scale. We argue that the risks posed by increased numbers of sheep and goats have not been adequately re- cognized, since sheep and goat management bypasses the traditional approaches to thinking and governing land in the Greater Mara. Sheep and goat ownership therefore has the potential to develop disproportionately if they are not immediately integrated into conservancy management policies. 1. Introduction The Greater Mara ecosystem in Kenya’s southwest corner is known worldwide for its annual great migration, rich biodiversity, and Maasai pastoralist culture. In recent years, however, the area has grown into a myriad-complex space, and a wide array of recent studies have de- monstrated extreme declines in wildlife populations in Greater Mara, as well as multi-causal increases in human-wildlife conflicts (Ogutu et al., 2011). Declines in wildlife numbers and increasing human-wildlife conflicts raise a series of fundamental questions relating to the con- tinued coexistence of humans and wildlife, under accelerating ecolo- gical and cultural pressure. The people living in this area are predominantly pastoralists, and the Maasai refer to themselves as iltung’ana loo ngishu, meaning “people of cattle” (Homewood and Rodgers, 2004). The Maasai’s semi-nomadic lifestyle is traditionally dependent on seasonal grazing, and with minimal labor investment, seasonal grazing reduces the otherwise fatal consequences of drought. Maasai pastoralism has commonly relied on collaborative forms of managing cattle, echoing Oström’s (1990) con- cept of common property regimes (CPR), where communities cooperate to manage a common-pool resource, in this case grass. Cattle play a crucial role in the coordination of land use, but they are also in- trinsically associated with most of the other aspects of life—status, social power, rites, and concepts of what to do and what not to do (Homewood and Rodgers, 2004). In this sense, the role of cattle in Maasai culture can be compared to that of a dispositive. A dispositive is the basic blueprint of social, institutional, physical, juridical, adminis- trative, and architectural structures and prescriptions that shape and organize social life and reality, with the dispositive establishing links between these elements (Foucault, 1994; Rabinow and Rose, 2003; Agamben, 2007). Since dispositives are highly habitual in the sense that they—at least partly—determine what is taken for granted and what can be imagined, they can also be incredibly stable over time. In this paper, we articulate how the rapidly expanding number of sheep/goats (shoats) in the Greater Mara essentially escape the cultural norms and collective regulations associated with cattle. This constitutes a major ecological and cultural challenge, and we suggest that current conservancy policies need to increasingly recognize and integrate sheep and goat ownership while continuously relying on community em- beddedness. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2018.04.029 Received 5 October 2017; Received in revised form 12 April 2018; Accepted 13 April 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University, Højbjerg, 8270, Denmark. 1 These authors contributed equally to this work. E-mail addresses: lovschal@cas.au.dk (M. Løvschal), dod@btech.au.dk (D.D. Håkonsson), irene.amoke@kenyawildlifetrust.org (I. Amoke).