Since the early 2000s, concerns have increased that global cut flower production might cause a collapse of the local SES around Lake Naivasha. Media reports began to appear with alarming headlines, such as ‘The tragedy that is Lake Naivasha’ (Hunter 2009) and ‘Lake Naivasha is dying’ (Riungi 2009). NGO reports critical of labour conditions (see e.g., Kenya Human Rights Commission 2012) and scientific works on the ecology of the lake (see e.g., Harper et al. 2011) reinforced this image of Lake Naivasha’s endangered state. Often, apocalyptical scenarios are linked to the cut flower industry, which, for this purpose, is portrayed as a profoundly unsustainable business, both socially and economically.

So far, this book has discussed Lake Naivasha mainly as a hub for the production of cut flowers and focused on the internal dynamics in the industry. Here, I conceived of Lake Naivasha as a translocal agro-industrial cluster, referring to a relational instead of a locational understanding of place (see Chapter 4). Yet, as the quoted apocalyptical scenarios show, the framing of the cut flower market, creating an inside and an outside of it (see Callon 1998a), also refers to Lake Naivasha’s SES. In the process of marketisation, boundaries are established between what is included in market relations, what counts as economic and what does not. Thus, the framing of markets ‘constitutes powerful mechanisms of exclusion, for to frame means to select, to sever links’ (Callon 2007a, 140). These processes of inclusion and exclusion specifically relate to agencies usually termed as ‘non-economic’ actors (see e.g., Coe et al. 2008, 280), for instance stakeholder groups or environmental objects.

As such, this chapter will answer questions on what agencies the new market order creates and, more generally, how the Lake Naivasha SES system relates to the new cut flower market order following the entry and growing dominance of European retail chains in cut flower sales. In order to do so, I will scrutinise the role of the cut flower industry in place-making processes at Lake Naivasha.