Across eastern and southern Africa, conservation landscapes increasingly extend far beyond the boundaries of government-owned protected areas. Several countries have now granted full legal recognition to various types of private or otherwise nonstate conservation arrangements, thereby often seeking to create novel opportunities for ostensibly “green” capital investments in various for-profit conservation enterprises. Following the adoption of the 2013 Wildlife Conservation and Management Act in Kenya, for instance, nonstate conservancies now encompass 6.36 million hectares—or 11 percent of the country’s land area—with at least a further 3 million hectares proposed or in the process of territorialization. Examining the consequences of this precipitous rise of conservancies in southern Kenya’s Maasai Mara region, we suggest that—in addition to significant potential for considerable profit margins to be realized by individual firms—these investments retain a number of other unique powers or capacities to transform prevailing varieties of environmental governance. In this case, these capacities manifest in two interrelated forms: first, in the dissemination of environmental crisis narratives that stigmatize pastoralist communities and thus drive down land rents or values and, second, in the recapitalization of conservation territories and the reconfiguration of prevailing land uses in ways that enable novel forms of rural gentrification via the capture of heightened or differential ground rents.

在整个非洲东部和南部，自然保护区的范围日益扩大，远远超出了政府拥有的保护区的范围。现在有几个国家已对各种类型的私人或非国家保护安排给予了充分的法律承认，从而经常寻求为表面上的“绿色”资本投资在各种营利性保护企业中创造新的机会。例如，在2013年肯尼亚通过《野生动物保护与管理法》之后，非国家保护区目前已占地636万公顷，占该国土地面积的11％，并且至少有300万公顷的拟议土地或正在实行领土保护。审查了肯尼亚南部马赛马拉地区的保护性急剧上升的后果，我们建议，除了个别公司可以实现可观的利润率的巨大潜力外，这些投资还具有许多其他独特的能力或能力，可以改变环境治理的主要品种。在这种情况下，这些能力表现为两种相互关联的形式：第一，传播环境危机的叙述，使牧民蒙受耻辱，从而降低土地租金或价值，第二，保护区的资本重组和主要土地用途的重新配置通过获取增加的或有差别的地租来实现新型的农村高档化。