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This paper aims to explore the complex underpinnings and dynamics of increasing trend of illegal trading of high-value forest tress such as sandalwood in rural parts of Kenya, which has moved from highly opportunistic and culturally accepted activities to highly complex, commercial, criminal and entrepreneurial activity. The paper focuses on two theoretical frameworks: the first concerns with criminological concepts which underlie illegal logging, perpetrators and criminal network of smuggling of sandalwood from Kenya to overseas; the second focuses on the entrepreneurial process of the illegal trade of the endangered species. The central aim is to establish a confluence of criminology (rural and environmental) and entrepreneurship – the product of which can be useful in understanding emerging and highly sophisticated international crimes such smuggling and trafficking of sandalwood tree product. It proposes that sandalwood poaching just like other transnational crimes such as wildlife poaching is a highly organized international crime that involves more than one individual. The paper concludes by suggesting that sandalwood poaching is an entrepreneurial activity that impinges on criminological process, and to fully address the problem, we must address the supply and demand forces and the normative and social structure of source area.

This paper uses a systematic review and immersion in literature from journals, books, government and non-governmental organization publications to raise debates and discourses on issues pertaining to the phenomena of sandalwood poaching in Kenya. It also entailed sieving through court judgments, newspaper articles and TV news to backup above information.

First, what has emanated from this study is that criminal cartels have directed their criminal business of sandalwood poaching to Kenya because force of demand and supply of precious wood, institution failures and regulatory and policy failures. Second, sandalwood poaching is ostensibly organized international enterprise crime that relies on division of labor to succeed. Third, more restrictive controls act as incentives to criminals to smuggle the wood. Finally, the more endangered the sandalwood, the more valuable and profitable it is and the more the poor countries and rural areas suffer from environmental degradation.

Methodologically, one of the major limitations of this paper is that it is based on documentary analysis, because of a lack of research time and available finances. Prospective studies should consider utilizing in-depth interviews to gather evidence from offenders, police, rural residents and other government officials.

The paper contributes to growing fields of entrepreneurial, environmental and rural criminology. Methodologically, certain crimes such sandalwood poaching requires an intertwine of concepts of criminological and entrepreneurship for better understanding.

To environmentalist, foresters, jurist, law enforcers and rural local residents; there is an urgent need to rethink how poaching of valuable endangered biodiversity species is treated, responded and promoted. To end poaching of sandalwood, there is a need to fundamentally realign tactics from criminalization and enforcement to address endemic cancer of poverty, unemployment and corruption present at source countries. This will indeed reduce economic vulnerabilities that cartels take advantage by engaging the locals in extracting sandalwood from trees. It will also reduce the power of networks but instead increase guardianship measures.

The originality of paper is the utilization of two theoretical frameworks: the first concerns with criminological concepts which underlie illegal logging, perpetrators and criminal network of smuggling of sandalwood from Kenya to overseas; and, second, the paper focuses on the entrepreneurial process of the illegal trade of the endangered species. The central aim is to establish a confluence of criminology (rural and environmental) and entrepreneurship – the product of which can be useful in understanding emerging and highly sophisticated international crimes such smuggling and trafficking of sandalwood tree product.

Forests support human livelihoods and mitigate against climate change, yet they are at a risk of irreversible loss due to high degradation rates. The success of forest conservation mechanisms depends on involvement and support by forest dependent communities. In this paper, the authors assess forest dependent household's willingness to pay (WTP) labour or cash for a conservation programme seeking to restore degraded forestland in Mount Elgon Forest, Kenya.

Data were collected from 919 households in Mt Elgon forest reserve, Kenya. A double bounded contingent valuation approach was used to examine households' WTP and an ordered probit model to estimate the determinants of WTP.

The findings of the study show a higher WTP for conservation through labour days (12 days/month, equivalent to 1800 KES/month) compared to cash (KES 450/month). Forest dependence has a significant influence on households' willingness to support conservation activities. A higher WTP was observed amongst households with higher vulnerability (high shocks value, low asset value and those in the poorest wealth categories) implying that they are more willing to contribute for forest conservation.

While emerging literature on WTP for forest conservation is growing, few studies have paid attention on the influence of forest dependence on WTP for forest conservation. There are limited studies on use of in-kind contribution as a payment vehicle for WTP. The study's findings show a high WTP in form of labour suggesting the importance of embracing in-kind contribution as a mechanism of supporting forest conservation in contexts of developing countries.

In Africa, poverty and food insecurity is pervasive due to intertwined factors including, declining crop yields, land degradation and inadequate policy and institutional support. With ever-increasing populations, climate change effects will be intensified, and a major crisis is inevitable unless measures to sustain land resources are urgently taken. This paper aims to argue that vibrant rural institutions are necessary to ensure food security and environmental protection, consequently contributing to climate change resilience.

The paper demonstrates the role of institutions by evaluating two types of institutions and their impacts the “status quo” and “hybrid” institutions using case studies from the African Highlands Initiative in Uganda and International Forestry Resources and Institutions in Kenya. It further discusses a model that highlights factors affecting smallholder investment in natural resources management and how these can be used to strengthen local institutions in building their resilience against climate change effects.

Weak grassroots institutions characterized by low capacity, failure to exploit collective capital and poor knowledge sharing and access to information, are common barriers to sustainable land management and improved food security.

Case studies from Uganda and IFRI in Kenya barriers in data collection instruments and language.

In Africa, poverty and food insecurity is pervasive due to intertwined factors including, declining crop yields, land degradation and inadequate policy and institutional support. With ever increasing populations, climate change effects will be intensified, and a major crisis is inevitable unless measures to sustain land resources are urgently taken.

In Africa, poverty and food insecurity is pervasive due to intertwined factors including, declining crop yields, land degradation and inadequate policy and institutional support. With ever-increasing populations, climate change effects will be intensified, and a major crisis is inevitable unless measures to sustain land resources are urgently taken.

The paper further discusses a model that highlights factors affecting smallholder investment in natural resources management and how these can be used to strengthen local institutions in building their resilience against climate change effects.

The International Climate Change Regime is important for the very survival of the humankind. However, the unimpressive results and escalation of the challenges are becoming very dangerous. By looking into participation at the international level, this chapter finds that women’s participation is very low. The chapter relies on the Feminist Theory for International Law and Relations to argue that the international regime is lacking women’s leadership traits as solidarity, creativity, and resilience. The cases of the El Nino in Peru, local farming in Brazil, and energy efficiency for cookstoves in Kenya present positive examples in which women’s participation is essential, generating a model bottom-up that includes local and transnational levels that fill that gap that risks global environmental and human health and life itself.

Wangari Maathai – environmentalist, political activist, human rights champion, and international spokesperson for environmental justice – combined scientific expertise with traditional African respect for the land and compassion for individual persons. She was thus able to build a movement to preserve the land, foster citizen empowerment, and inspire activism to effect systemic change. Her legacy is both local and international, with more than 5,000 active citizen networks in Kenya having planted more than 51 million trees.

As a child, Maathai was taught to revere the earth as infused with divine presence. Through study, she added knowledge of scientific principles that govern the natural world, as well as complex interactions between humans and earth. What she saw was the delicate and essential interdependence of environmental and social needs.

Over the course of 45 years of activism, in Kenya and on the world stage, she learned to address individual human suffering and challenge the systems responsible for the pain, including political and economic corruption. Maathai was, in many ways, a prototypical grassroots leader in the heroic vein. She insistently rebuffed attempts to romanticize poverty or consider it inevitable; she refused to surrender to oppression and exploitation – sometimes at significant personal risk.

Maathai left rich resources – a memoir and handbook, essays, speeches, papers, editorials – plus an active Movement. Emphasis in this essay, which draws on those resources plus insights of scholars, journalists, filmmakers, family, friends, and critics, some through personal interview, is what her strategies and achievements suggest for ongoing leadership for Africa.

This paper seeks to examine how the biodiversity comprising a tropical forest ecosystem is being protected as a result of having its conservation brought into financial accounting calculations by constructing a greenhouse gas emissions offset product to sell on the voluntary over‐the‐counter carbon markets.

The research examines a single embedded case study of a biodiversity conservation project in Kenya. The resulting discussion builds upon the existing accounting and organisation studies literature regarding the construction of markets.

Whilst the case examined does successfully bring tropical forest biodiversity conservation into the financial accounting calculations of the sellers and buyers of the offset product, via processes of objectification and singularisation, there are considerable accounting obstacles to constructing a calculative mechanism capable of achieving this on a global scale to facilitate financing of the conservation of all the world's remaining tropical forest biodiversity.

The paper contributes to the debate on accounting for biodiversity by examining market construction as a theoretical framework for turning the loss/conservation of biodiversity from an externality into an entity that is taken into account in organisations' calculations of profit and loss.

Commercial entities have recently expressed growing interest in commercialising indigenous knowledge (IK) due to its enormous economic and intrinsic value. As this happens, custodial communities must not be disadvantaged in the process. This paper aims to understand the legal framework of the commercialisation of IK to identify the opportunities and factors impeding or affecting the commercialisation of indigenous knowledge in Kenya.

The study used a qualitative research approach. An extensive exploratory literature review of existing legal instruments was done to establish the progress and gaps for commercialising indigenous knowledge in Kenya.

The study shows that the legal framework of IK in Kenya is inadequate. There are no well-established frameworks and policies to protect IK in Kenya, and thus, host communities are subjected to exploitation. The diversity of tribes and communities makes it challenging to have a clear framework, mainly because IK is a devolved function. The study identifies the Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Cultural Expressions Act 2016, The National Museums and Heritage Act 2006 and the Natural Products Industry as the key milestones towards commercialisation of IK, while inadequate documentation of IK, communal ownership and inadequate legislation were identified as the main impediments to commercialisation of IK in Kenya.

Owing to the diverse cultures and tribal communities in Kenya, the research could not access all the literature on all traditional IK in Kenya, and very few case studies have been conducted in Kenya.

The gaps identified in the legal framework can form a basis for legislation, policy change, actions and research needed to improve the commercialisation of IK.

The paper underscores the importance of balancing economic empowerment with preserving cultural integrity and protecting indigenous rights in commercialisation.

One Acre Fund (1AF) is a nonprofit organization in rural western Kenya that helps farmers lift themselves out of poverty by providing a bundle of products and services that support farmers with quality inputs, training on farming techniques, access to credit, and assistance in achieving optimal prices. Since the organization's founding nearly a decade ago, it has grown to serve over 180,000 farm families annually as of July 2014. This high level of penetration into rural Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, and Tanzania makes 1AF a potential distribution channel for rolling out new products and technologies that could benefit farmers and their families. The organization prides itself on its innovative culture, and always strives to offer new products and methods to its farmers. In 2011 1AF realized that it needed to formalize its innovation process to ensure it was confident in new products before rolling them out across its entire farmer network. It therefore created a robust, multistep evaluation framework to assess new innovations on four criteria: impact, adoptability, simplicity, and operability.

After reading and analyzing the case, students will be able to:

• Articulate the importance of understanding the user's needs and perspective throughout the innovation process

• Identify key factors for a successful product launch into an existing channel

• Employ an assessment framework to analyze the viability of a potential innovation

• Design a test pilot for evaluating the launch of new innovations within an organization

Articulate the importance of understanding the user's needs and perspective throughout the innovation process

Identify key factors for a successful product launch into an existing channel

Employ an assessment framework to analyze the viability of a potential innovation

Design a test pilot for evaluating the launch of new innovations within an organization