1 Decentralization in Kenya : The Governance of Governors

Kenya’s March 2013 elections ushered in a popular system of devolved government that represented the country’s biggest political transformation since independence. Yet within months there were public calls for a referendum to significantly revise the new arrangements. This article analyses the campaign that was led by the new elected governors in order to understand the ongoing disputes over the introduction of decentralization in Kenya, and what they tell us about the potential for devolution to check the power of central government and to diffuse political and ethnic tensions. Drawing on Putnam’s theory of two-level games, we suggest that Kenya’s new governors have proved willing and capable of acting in concert to protect their own positions because the pressure that governors are placed under at the local level to defend county interests has made it politically dangerous for them to be co-opted by the centre. As a result, the Kenyan experience cannot be read as a case of * The authors would like to thank Job Bwonye, Alex Dyzenhaus, Amanda Magisu, and Betty Okero for writing the county-level reports that this analysis draws upon. We would also like to thank Dominic Burbidge, who collected county level data in support of this analysis and whose work we draw on in the section entitled “The design of decentralization”. Two anonymous reviewers and the editors of JMAS provided comments and suggestions that have significantly improved the quality of the