The Protected Landscape Approach - Centre for Mediterranean ...

The Protected Landscape Approach: Linking Nature, Culture and Community
approach combined with appropriate enabling frameworks can support the livelihood needs of
mobile people as well as deliver positive conservation impacts.
Maintaining wildlife dispersal areas and migration corridors
in Kenya: protected landscapes and the Maasai
Most national parks and reserves in Kenya are too small to be viable and many of them must
depend on intervening private lands that serve as wildlife dispersal and migratory areas. With
human encroachment and different land use priorities outside on private land, biodiversity loss
outside protected areas, especially in migration corridors and dispersal areas, is inevitable
(Mwale, 2000; Okello and Kiringe, 2004). Parks such as Nairobi and Nakuru are now severely
affected by loss of dispersal areas (Western, 1997). This case study considers how a protected
landscape approach could maintain wildlife dispersal areas and migration corridors on the land
of Maasai pastoralists.
The protected landscape character of Maasai communal lands
The Maasai live in communally owned group ranches established in the early 1960s in the
Olkuejado, Narok and Trans Mara districts of Kenya (Cheeseman, 2001). One of the areas
inhabited by the Maasai is the Tsavo-Amboseli area, which is made up of six group ranches.
This lived-in, working landscape represents one of the major remaining areas of wildlife in
Kenya outside protected areas. It is rangeland of outstanding visual quality and beauty
overlooked by the world famous Mount Kilimanjaro, and the scenic Chyulu Hills. The wildlife
is free-ranging and abundant, moving between the protected areas of Tsavo and Amboseli
The lived-in, working landscape of the
Tsavo-Amboseli Ecosystem, inhabited by
the Maasai, represents one of the major areas
for wildlife in Kenya outside of protected
areas. The Chyulu Hills (shown here) and
Mt. Kilimanjaro greatly influence the ecology
of the area. Moses M. Okello
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