Last updated: June 2026
Conservation in Laikipia is often told as a story of individual conservancies — Ol Pejeta’s rhinos, Il Ngwesi’s community lodge, Lewa’s anti-poaching dogs. But wildlife doesn’t respect property boundaries, and protecting an entire ecosystem requires the conservancies to work together. That is the role of the Laikipia Conservancies Association (LCA): a member-led body that unites the region’s conservancies to coordinate conservation across the whole landscape, amplify their collective voice, and ensure the connectivity on which wide-ranging wildlife depends. It’s less famous than the conservancies it represents, but arguably just as important — the connective leadership that turns a scattering of properties into a functioning conservation region. This guide explains what the LCA is, what it does, the longer history of organised conservation in Laikipia, and its vision for the future.
If you want to understand how Laikipia’s conservation actually holds together at a landscape scale, the story of its conservancy association is where to look.
What Is the Laikipia Conservancies Association?
The Laikipia Conservancies Association is a member-led organisation that brings together the conservancies of Laikipia to act collectively rather than in isolation. Its central purpose is to ensure landscape connectivity — keeping the wider ecosystem joined up so wildlife can move freely — and to amplify the individual impact of its members by coordinating their efforts, sharing knowledge and resources, and representing the conservancies’ common interests. In a region where conservation happens on dozens of separate private and community properties, such coordination is essential: a single conservancy can protect its own land, but only a united effort can protect the corridors, manage shared challenges and present a coherent vision for the whole plateau. The LCA, in effect, is the body that lets Laikipia’s conservancies punch above their individual weight, turning many separate conservation islands into a connected, collaborative whole.
Why Landscape-Scale Coordination Matters
The case for an association comes down to a simple ecological truth: wildlife needs space, and space crosses boundaries. Elephants, wild dogs and other wide-ranging species move across multiple conservancies and the community and ranch lands between them, so their survival depends on the whole landscape being managed coherently — the corridors kept open, threats tackled in concert, and conservation aligned across properties. No single conservancy, however well run, can secure this alone. Landscape-scale coordination also brings practical strength: members can share anti-poaching intelligence, pool resources for expensive equipment, align grazing and wildlife management, speak with one voice to government and donors, and market the region collectively. By coordinating at the scale at which ecosystems actually function, the association addresses the gap that individual action leaves — making the difference between fragmented, vulnerable conservation and a resilient, joined-up system that can sustain Laikipia’s remarkable biodiversity for the long term.
What the Association Does
The association’s work spans several fronts. It facilitates coordination and collaboration among member conservancies, helping them align conservation strategies and manage the shared landscape, including the vital corridors between properties. It provides a collective voice, representing the conservancies’ interests to county and national government, donors and partners, and advocating for policies that support conservation. It supports members through knowledge-sharing, capacity-building and the pooling of resources and expertise, raising standards across the board. It promotes the region — showcasing “Destination Laikipia” to investors and visitors, and highlighting the conservation and tourism opportunities the plateau offers. And it works to ensure that conservation delivers for communities as well as wildlife, in keeping with Laikipia’s whole philosophy. Through these roles, the LCA acts as the coordinating backbone of conservation in the region, enabling collective achievements that no member could reach on its own.
A Tradition of Organised Conservation
The association builds on a long Laikipia tradition of conservationists organising to act together. Coordinated, landscape-level conservation in Laikipia stretches back decades, notably through the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, established in the early 1990s, which pioneered bringing landowners, communities and stakeholders together around shared conservation and development goals across the plateau. That heritage of collaboration — unusual in a landscape of private and community properties — laid the groundwork for today’s coordinated approach and the conservancy movement that followed. The Laikipia Conservancies Association represents the latest evolution of this tradition, a member-led body focused specifically on uniting the conservancies for landscape connectivity and collective impact. Understanding this lineage matters, because it shows that Laikipia’s success is not the product of any single organisation or moment, but of a sustained, decades-long culture of working together for conservation — a culture that the association now carries forward.
The Member Conservancies
The strength of the association lies in its members — the conservancies that make up Laikipia’s conservation landscape. These range from large, world-renowned private conservancies famous for rhino and innovation, to community-owned conservancies where local people lead conservation on their own land, to working ranches that integrate wildlife with livestock. Together they protect a vast, varied and connected area, each contributing its own land, wildlife and conservation work to the collective whole. By uniting this diversity of conservancies under one coordinating body, the association harnesses their combined scale and expertise while respecting their independence. The variety is itself a strength: private innovation, community empowerment and integrated ranching each bring different models and lessons, and the association helps them learn from one another and align toward shared goals. It is this membership — diverse, committed and increasingly coordinated — that gives Laikipia its conservation weight, both within Kenya and internationally.
Achievements and Impact
The collective approach the association embodies has helped deliver the achievements for which Laikipia is celebrated: the protection and recovery of endangered species across a connected landscape, the maintenance of wildlife corridors, coordinated anti-poaching, and a conservation model that channels real benefits to communities. By enabling conservancies to act together, share intelligence and resources, and present a united front, the association multiplies the impact of each member’s individual work. Its promotion of the region helps attract the tourism and investment that fund conservation, while its coordinating role strengthens the landscape connectivity that underpins everything. Perhaps its greatest contribution is intangible: fostering the collaboration and shared purpose that allow a patchwork of independent properties to function as a single conservation region. In a world where fragmented, uncoordinated conservation so often fails, Laikipia’s united approach — embodied by its conservancy association — stands as a model of what collective action can achieve.
The Vision for Laikipia’s Future
Looking ahead, the association’s vision is of a Laikipia where conservation, communities and sustainable tourism thrive together across a connected, resilient landscape. That means securing the corridors and connectivity that wildlife needs, deepening the benefits conservation brings to communities, strengthening the conservancies and the collaboration between them, and positioning Laikipia as a leading destination where visiting directly supports conservation. The challenges are real — land pressures, climate and drought, balancing livelihoods with wildlife, and sustaining the funding on which it all depends — but the coordinated, collective approach gives the region its best chance of meeting them. For travellers, the takeaway is encouraging: by visiting Laikipia and supporting its conservancies and communities, you become part of this shared vision, contributing to a model of conservation that aims to secure both wildlife and human wellbeing for generations to come, as our guide to conservation and community tourism explores.
Connecting to the National Conservation Movement
The Laikipia Conservancies Association does not operate in isolation; it forms part of a wider national movement to advance community and private conservation across Kenya. At the national level, bodies such as the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association represent the country’s conservancies, advocating for supportive policy and legislation and connecting regional associations like Laikipia’s into a national whole. This linkage matters because many of the factors shaping conservation — wildlife law, land policy, benefit-sharing frameworks, support for conservancies — are decided at the national level, and a coordinated voice carries far more weight than scattered individual conservancies. By plugging Laikipia’s collective voice into the national conservation movement, the association helps ensure the region’s interests and its pioneering experience inform policy, while also drawing on national support and frameworks. This nesting of local coordination within regional and national structures is part of what makes Kenya’s conservancy movement so effective, allowing successful local models like Laikipia’s to influence and strengthen conservation across the entire country and beyond.
Destination Laikipia: Marketing for Conservation
One of the association’s important roles is promoting the region as a destination — and in Laikipia, marketing and conservation are directly linked. Because tourism funds conservation here, attracting visitors and investment to the plateau is itself a conservation activity: more responsible tourism means more revenue for rangers, communities and wildlife protection. The association helps showcase “Destination Laikipia,” highlighting the region’s extraordinary wildlife, its conservancies, its conservation story and the opportunities it offers visitors and investors. By presenting Laikipia collectively rather than leaving each conservancy to fend for itself, the association raises the region’s profile and helps draw the sustainable tourism on which the whole model depends. This collective promotion is especially valuable for smaller and community conservancies that lack the marketing reach of the famous names. For travellers, it means a more coherent picture of what the region offers; for conservation, it means a stronger flow of the tourism revenue that funds it. Marketing the destination, in Laikipia, is quite literally marketing conservation.
How the Association Supports Communities
True to Laikipia’s philosophy, the association’s work extends beyond wildlife to the communities at the heart of conservation. Its membership includes community-owned conservancies alongside private ones, and its coordinating role helps ensure that conservation across the landscape delivers benefits to local people — supporting the community conservancy movement, helping channel resources and expertise to community members, and advocating for the benefit-sharing on which the whole model rests. By representing community conservancies within the collective and connecting them to support, markets and a louder voice, the association helps strengthen community-led conservation and the livelihoods it sustains. This community dimension is essential, because the association understands what all of Laikipia’s conservation rests upon: that wildlife survives only where the people who share the land benefit from and support its protection. In coordinating conservation at a landscape scale, the association therefore works not just for wildlife but for the communities whose partnership makes conservation possible — reflecting the inseparable link between conservation and community that defines the entire region.
Challenges the Association Helps Tackle
Coordinating across a whole landscape allows the association to help its members confront challenges too big for any single conservancy. Drought and the pressures of a changing climate affect the entire region, straining grazing, water and the wildlife and livestock that depend on them, and demanding coordinated responses. Maintaining wildlife corridors and connectivity requires cooperation across many properties and community lands. Anti-poaching and security benefit from shared intelligence and joined-up effort across boundaries. Complex questions of land, grazing and benefit-sharing play out across the landscape and need collective navigation. And sustaining conservation funding, especially through shocks, is a shared concern. By enabling members to share resources, knowledge and intelligence, to coordinate responses, and to speak with one voice to government and donors, the association strengthens the whole region’s ability to meet these challenges. None of them can be solved by individual conservancies acting alone, which is precisely the point of the association: it provides the landscape-scale coordination that the landscape-scale challenges demand, making the region’s conservation far more resilient than the sum of its parts.
How Travellers Fit In
For visitors, the association’s work might seem remote from the experience of a safari, but travellers are in fact central to the whole endeavour. By visiting Laikipia, choosing conservancies and responsible lodges, and paying the fees that fund conservation, travellers provide the tourism revenue that the association’s members depend on and that its promotion of the region seeks to attract. Every responsible visit strengthens the conservation economy that the collective effort exists to sustain. Choosing a range of conservancies — including community-owned ones — spreads the benefit across the membership. Travellers can also support the broader cause by learning and sharing Laikipia’s conservation story, and by recognising that the connected, wildlife-rich landscape they enjoy is the product of the coordinated effort the association embodies. In this sense, visiting Laikipia thoughtfully makes you a participant in the very landscape-scale conservation the association coordinates — a small but real contributor to the collective vision of a connected, thriving region where wildlife, communities and sustainable tourism flourish together, as our conservation tourism guide describes.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the association connect to national conservation bodies?
It forms part of a wider national movement, linking into bodies such as the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association that represent conservancies nationally and advocate for supportive policy and legislation. This nesting of local coordination within regional and national structures gives Laikipia a stronger collective voice on the wildlife law, land policy and benefit-sharing decided at the national level.
Does the association help community conservancies?
Yes. Its membership includes community-owned conservancies alongside private ones, and its coordinating role helps ensure conservation delivers community benefits — supporting the community conservancy movement, channelling resources and expertise, providing a louder collective voice and market access, and advocating for benefit-sharing. This reflects Laikipia’s core principle that conservation depends on communities benefiting from wildlife.
What challenges does the association help tackle?
Landscape-scale challenges too big for any single conservancy: drought and climate pressures, maintaining wildlife corridors and connectivity across many properties, coordinated anti-poaching and security, complex land and benefit-sharing questions, and sustaining conservation funding. By pooling resources, intelligence and a united voice, the association makes the region’s conservation far more resilient than individual conservancies acting alone.
How can visitors support the association’s work?
By visiting Laikipia responsibly — choosing conservancies and conservation-minded lodges, paying the fees that fund conservation, and spreading the benefit across different conservancies including community-owned ones. Every responsible visit strengthens the conservation economy the association’s members depend on, making travellers central participants in the landscape-scale conservation it coordinates.
What is the Laikipia Conservancies Association?
It’s a member-led organisation that unites the conservancies of Laikipia to coordinate conservation across the whole landscape. Its central aims are to ensure landscape connectivity — so wildlife can move freely across the ecosystem — and to amplify the collective impact of its members by sharing resources, aligning conservation efforts, and representing the conservancies’ common interests.
Why is a conservancies association necessary?
Because wildlife crosses property boundaries, and wide-ranging species like elephants and wild dogs depend on the whole landscape being managed coherently. No single conservancy can secure the corridors or tackle shared threats alone. The association coordinates members, pools resources and intelligence, provides a collective voice to government and donors, and promotes the region — making conservation work at the scale ecosystems actually function.
What does the association do?
It coordinates collaboration among member conservancies, helps keep wildlife corridors open, provides a collective voice to government, donors and partners, supports members through knowledge-sharing and capacity-building, promotes “Destination Laikipia” to visitors and investors, and works to ensure conservation benefits communities as well as wildlife. In short, it’s the coordinating backbone of conservation in the region.
How long has organised conservation existed in Laikipia?
For decades. Coordinated, landscape-level conservation in Laikipia stretches back to the early 1990s, notably through the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, which pioneered bringing landowners, communities and stakeholders together around shared goals. The Laikipia Conservancies Association represents the latest evolution of this long tradition of conservationists working together.
Which conservancies are members?
Members range from large, world-renowned private conservancies famous for rhino and conservation innovation, to community-owned conservancies where local people lead conservation on their own land, to working ranches integrating wildlife with livestock. This diversity is a strength, uniting different conservation models under one coordinating body while respecting each conservancy’s independence.
Round out your understanding with our guides to the Laikipia conservancies, the Laikipia conservation model, and the full conservation and community tourism guide.
