In her dissertation "The Political Ecology And Governance Of Urban Green Spaces In Nairobi's Informal Settlements", Valentine Opanga examines the politics and governance of urban green spaces in Nairobi's informal settlements, exploring how urban greening intersects with land governance, colonial legacies, performative politics, and grassroots resistance, leading to uneven socio-ecological outcomes. Using frameworks such as Urban Political Ecology (UPE), Postcolonial Urbanism, and Travelling Models, the dissertation presents green spaces as contested sites where elite ambitions clash with local care and survival practices. The thesis employs an embodied, decolonial approach with mixed methods, including ethnography, participatory mapping, GIS, ecological transects, life histories, around 45 interviews, six focus group discussions, archival and policy analysis, and participant observation. It incorporates reflexive, sensory, and positional methods (e.g., storytelling) to emphasise grassroots knowledge, researcher situatedness, and residents' experiences.
The dissertation consists of four interconnected articles: the first investigates land control in Korogocho informal settlement, identifying key actors, performative politics, social embeddedness, cartel authority, and exclusionary practices; the second explores how power influences urban ecologies in Pumwani-Majengo, illustrating how land struggles trigger greening, ungreening, enclosure, displacement, dispossession, enclave formation, and uneven ecological outcomes through hybrid authorities; the third synthesises insights from both sites to demonstrate how transnational green models interact with local power structures, historical injustices, narratives, struggles, and everyday creativity to shape who benefits from and who is dispossessed by urban green initiatives; and the fourth analyses ethnographic fieldwork from Nairobi and Addis Ababa to conceptualise the 'urban invisibles,' suggesting that vulnerabilities and affective fieldwork dynamics influence data collection and reveal how knowledge practices contribute to marginalisation.
It underscores contradictions: elite agendas versus community claims; formal policies versus informal governance (brokers, cartels); global models versus local survival strategies. Outcomes range from stewardship and aspirational ecologies to dispossession, green gentrification, and gendered exclusion. It advocates policies that address power dynamics beyond merely technical aspects of greening.
The Department of Geography warmly congratulates Valentine Opanga on her successful defense of the dissertation!
