Abstract

Since the world gathered in Stockholm Sweden for an international Conference on the Human Environment, environmental law has grown exponentially. The quest for sustainable development has taken centre stage with the landmark United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 charting pathways for achieving sustainable development by addressing emergent challenges such as biological diversity loss; climate change and desertification. For the past three decades, African countries have negotiated, adopted, ratified and participated in the making of numerous treaties and conventions on areas ranging from access to information, public participation in decision making, access to justice, environmental impact assessment, climate change, women's rights, nature conservation, biosafety, biodiversity, among others. Kenya is among countries that have elaborate environmental management laws anchored on a transformative constitution that includes international law as part of law; supported by a robust framework environmental law and very detailed laws and policies. Despite these remarkable developments and the establishment of an Environment and Land Court to ensure access to justice in environmental matters, implementation of the laws is characterized by discrepancies between the formal and the informal contexts. In this talk, I use specific examples to explore the normative contest between formal and informal natural resource management laws; climate change interventions and women's, children's, and nature's rights in environmental governance at international, national, and local levels in Kenya. I argue that the achievement of the sustainable development goals and successful transition to green growth through reduced greenhouse gas emissions in Kenya is predicated on the extent to which environmental governance is decolonized, engendered, deconstructed and reconstructed taking into account norms from the plurality of operative laws.

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