Voice in Local Development: Participation, Empowerment, and Accountability in Kenya

Many governments in semi-democratic regimes have adopted participatory democratic institutions to promote development and accountability. But limited resources, weak civil society, and a history of authoritarian politics make building subnational democratic institutions daunting. Our book addresses several important questions surrounding participatory democratic institutions: Do participatory institutions expand accountability, empower citizens, and advance development in these environments? We address these questions by evaluating citizen decision-making in Kenya's participatory budgeting processes. We administered a survey with embedded experiments surrounding citizens' development policy preferences to over 11,000 respondents in five Kenyan counties. We also collect parallel qualitative data through participant observation and over eighty elite interviews. We find limited evidence for transformative change from Kenyan Participatory Budgeting (PB), a set of programs that feature participant selection of development projects that governments implement. These programmes, at best, lay only minimal foundations for governance, accountability, and democracy. We develop three lines of reasoning to explain why Kenyan PB programmes produce relatively limited change and function more like participatory clientelism than co-governing venues: Kenya's local sociopolitical context, the adaptation of PB's internal rules, and shifts in the key PB actors combine to produce much different outcomes than those in Brazil and other places that adopted PB. We then show how specific changes in the sociopolitical context (e.g., uncompetitive local elections and party systems, fragmented local civil society, and a weak local state) contribute to relatively weak PB programmes. Finally, we help policymakers by redefining the parameters of the types of outcomes that are likely to emerge from new PB programmes, when, where, and for whom.