Shifting sands and ecological uncertainties: An urban political ecology of dredging in Mombasa

This article analyses the 2019 dredging operations conducted as part of the Mombasa Port Development Program (MPDP) and focuses on the political-ecological conflicts generated by this flagship project of Kenya's Vision 2030 . Adopted in cooperation with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the MPDP aims to adapt to rapidly evolving global logistics standards and reinforce Mombasa Port's position as a leading regional logistics hub. The article highlights how the extraction of offshore sand along the southern coast of Mombasa for land reclamation has generated important ecological uncertainties around dredging's impacts on coastal ecosystems and local livelihoods. It demonstrates how these uncertainties became eminently political as they were reframed through dominant planning paradigms, leading to eventual contestations by marginalized and peripheral actors in Mombasa when expert narratives revealed their limits and biases. I highlight how, fundamentally, this process crystallized an epistemic rift between different actors and social groups with variegated socio-spatial trajectories and uneven political-economic power, resulting in conflicting representations of coastal environments. The article emphasizes two main conflicting representations of coastal landscapes that underpin this rift: one favored by powerful domestic and foreign actors who frame coastal areas as exploitable spaces of logistics circulation and the other emerging from peripheral and marginalized communities in the city who perceive coastal areas as endangered spaces of preservation . Empirically, these translate into three interrelated areas of contestation that culminated in legal disputes surrounding the impacts of dredging: knowledge controversies resulting from the questioning of dominant expertise on the impacts of dredging, rent and economic distribution conflicts around uses of coastal environments, and conflicting visions of coastal development.