Rural pastoralist grazing-corridor demarcation and herd mobility under county land-use plans in Kenyan drylands: a boundary-discontinuity analysis of participatory mapping jurisdiction

Participatory mapping of grazing corridors in Kenyan drylands is routinely treated as a neutral technical input to county land-use planning, yet the jurisdictional boundaries it produces are discontinuous: a corridor mapped by one community group may terminate at a ward boundary, resume under a different name, and carry no legal force in the adjoining county. The argument is conceptual and methodological rather than empirical: no observational data are used or claimed. The paper specifies a before-after-control-impact design for evaluating corridor demarcation, characterises its operating characteristics under a declared variance structure (between-cluster SD = 6.0, residual SD = 4.5, intraclass correlation = 0.64), and reports that 54 clusters are required to detect a 5 percentage-point effect at 80% power. Power was estimated across 2000 design cells. The contribution is a framework that treats the participatory map not as a boundary but as a jurisdictional claim whose discontinuity is the object of analysis, and a design that makes the resulting mobility effects estimable.