The transformation of the previously rural area around Lake Naivasha in Kenya into a hub for global cut flower production is a highly contested process. The flower industry has attracted much international criticism for purportedly exploitative labour conditions and negative environmental consequences. Megan A. Styles presents Naivasha as a ‘nerve centre’ and makes clear that the flower industry also ‘touches nerves’ on national and local levels (8). Styles’ vivid ethnographic descriptions draw attention to the myriad local contestations refashioned and created by floriculture. This approach enables the reader to not only learn about the problematic sides of flower production in Kenya but to also get to know Naivasha as a site of possibility that has an important place in political and moral imaginations.

The first empirical chapter describes the history of environmental management in this contested place, thus pointing at the roots of current overlapping and partly incompatible claims of belonging in Naivasha. The chapter is based on a variety of archival and unpublished sources yet remains primarily based on elite views. Squatters and temporary workers on colonial settler farms, Kikuyu land-buyers in the post-independence period and workers of the first flower farms remain almost silent. The subsequent chapters are more inclusive and focus on four categories of actors in or affected by present-day floriculture: farm workers; middle-class professionals such as farm managers and labour advocates; civil servants and other parties involved in the development of state policies affecting the industry; and white Kenyans and expatriates connected to floriculture. The chapters highlight these actors’ points of view on Naivasha as a place, the influence of the flower industry, and their own belonging there. The chapters furthermore discuss these actors’ moral expectations towards each other.

Styles explicitly does not only consider subaltern points of view but also looks at the aspirations of more powerful actors. Workers’ varying experiences of the work itself and their living conditions therefore remain underexplored. Yet, this approach also accounts for some of the most insightful parts of the book. The chapters on middle-class professionals and various state actors, in particular, contain surprising observations on their motivations and aspirations in connection to floriculture and the Kenyan nation-state.

Styles conducted her fieldwork in Naivasha at what later turned out to be a watershed moment: the post-election violence in early 2008. Whereas Styles discusses how this affected her interlocutors and their perception of Naivasha at the time, her analysis does not include literature on the more long-term effects of the violence, such as a 2015 article by Lang and Sakdapolrak in Political Ethnography. She likewise does not refer to publications on recent changes in the flower industry's system of labour management, such as more formalised recruitment systems and an increase in permanent labour, which have reduced the ‘riskiness’ of flower farm employment that Styles describes (for instance two articles by Riisgaard and Gibbon in The Journal of Agrarian Change in 2014). The conclusion, based on a return visit in 2014, could have provided a more comprehensive long-term perspective if it had included references to such publications.

That said, Styles’ pleasant writing style and her focus on encounters between different actors make this book a rich ethnography. Although written from the vantage point of environmental anthropology, the book also contributes to current anthropological inquiry into future-making and into the (self-)understanding of elites. By showing the place of floriculture within individual and collective dreams and aspirations, Styles provides a deeper understanding of local experiences of global economic processes and of associated environmental change. The book furthermore offers insights into floriculture's place in contemporary Kenya. It goes a long way towards unravelling Naivasha's complexity and provides a deeper understanding of this highly contested place.