Kenya 2013-2014: From election monitoring to longer-term reform

This project aims to enable the UK government to better understand how to promote peace and democracy in Kenya, and to use the lessons of the Kenyan election of 2013 to help a range of international governments and policy makers to develop better democracy promotion and conflict avoidance strategies.

Kenya's 2013 elections have widely been seen as a crucial test of the impact of donor interventions and new institutional arrangements to deliver peaceful and credible elections. In the aftermath of the disputed elections of 2007 and the violence that followed, a substantial programme of political reform was drawn up, which intended to ensure a combination of democratic consolidation and institutional renewal that would prevent any repeat of such violence, or of the malpractice which helped to trigger it. These internationally supported changes included a new constitution and a raft of new legislation on political parties and elections, as well as security sector reform, a transformation of the judiciary and an entirely new election commission.

A wide range of bilateral parties, international agencies, and Kenyan civil society groups, provided substantial external support for these far-reaching processes, and for the 2013 elections themselves. In all, this amounts to an unusually sustained and comprehensive attempt to remake governance - all conducted without any change of regime, and in the life of a single parliament. Yet it is already clear that the impact of these reforms has been uneven. In the run up to the election, key parts of the legislative framework were removed, while security reform was never genuinely pursued. The conduct of the elections thus provides valuable evidence as to whether, how far, and in what ways this kind of programme of legal and institutional reform and electoral support can produce political transformation.

This project will analyse the effectiveness of this international and national effort in the light of the events of the election itself. It will use this analysis to develop recommendations for further support to reform and electoral processes in Kenya, and to identify comparative lessons for programmes of reform and electoral support elsewhere. The recommendations will be aimed both at Kenya's international partners in the UK government and in other governments and agencies, and at Kenyans directly involved in the reform process - whether within government, or as part of civil society organizations.

The project builds directly on, and will develop, an emerging cooperation between policy-makers in the UK government and a group of academic researchers. Through this partnership, the UK government - through the Africa Conflict Prevention Pool (ACPP) - is currently funding the first phase of this research on the Kenya elections by Lynch, Cheeseman and Willis. This research is directly informing UK government contingency planning and current electoral support work through reports and regular meetings between the researchers and staff from the FCO, DfID and MoD, in the UK and in Kenya.

Through circulation of reports and through meetings, the research is also being shared with the UK's international partners, and with some international agencies as well as with civil society organizations in Kenya. As a result, the project will have a real world impact that will extend beyond Kenya and the UK. The project has already provided a substantial body of data on the elections, and has generated a network of contacts with research-users in the UK, Kenya and more widely. The knowledge exchange phase will ensure that this research-based knowledge is used effectively in further promoting reform in Kenya, and in applying the lessons learned from this to programmes of political reform and democratic consolidation in other countries.

This project addresses the question of the conditions under which democratization is successful, and how donor governments can best promote democratic consolidation. This is a topic of great significance to a range of international governments and agencies, as well as the millions of people who live in emerging democracies.

Knowledge exchange:

The project is primarily concerned with feeding lessons learnt from Kenya's 2013 election back into future electoral and constitutional reform in Kenya and other semi-democratic regimes. An initial pre-election phase was funded by the UK's African Conflict Prevention Pool (ACPP), which demonstrates an existing collaborative partnership. The findings will also be of great relevance to civil-society and donor efforts to strengthen electoral systems and the quality of democracy around the world. Users will include:

(1) NGOs, policy makers, and pro-democracy advocates in Kenya;

(2) International promoters of free and fair elections in the UK policy community (FCO, DfID), in the international donor community (such as the European Union, Unites States Agency for International Development (USAID), and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and in the regional consultative bodies (such as the African Union and East African Community).

(3) International agencies concerned with conflict management and resolution, within the UK policy community (the ACPP: FCO, DFID, MOD), and international bodies such as the United Nations.

(4) Think tanks and policy advisory bodies such as the International Crisis Group (ICG) and Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Non-academic users will benefit in a variety of ways, enabling better informed and more effective work by donors, agencies, and civil society groups, and thus fostering a higher quality and more stable democracy in Kenya and elsewhere.

(1) By accessing new data about the context within which they work (the political economy of Kenya) and so being able to make more informed decisions, which has been highlighted by the UK government as one of the major 'value added' points of the current project.

(2) By accessing new information concerning the effectiveness of their strategies and interventions in Kenya, allowing them to make more informed decisions. The ACPP has explicitly stated this should be a goal of the second stage of this project, and fits with DFID's focus on Monitoring and Evaluation.

(3) Through the opportunity to collectively share, analyse, and evaluate past experiences with other organizations, researchers and agencies involved in electoral support and governance reform in Kenya. Policy makers have repeatedly told the researchers that they lack time to reflect on their overall goals and to 'compare notes' with colleagues, even when working collaboratively.

(4) As a result of specific and viable recommendations regarding the best way that donors, international agencies, and civil society groups, can support long-term peace and democratization in Kenya and similar countries.

(5) From new networks that will be built as a result of the repeated interaction of members of civil society, donors and international agencies at meetings and dissemination events, facilitating future collaboration.

While knowledge exchange with policy makers is the focus of this project, there will also be some academic beneficiaries as a by-product of this work:

(1) Academics interested in African and Kenyan politics, who will benefit from new empirical and theoretical contributions on the Kenyan elections of 2013 and the role played by civil society actors, donors and security services.

(2) Academics engaged in the study of elections, democracy promotion, and conflict avoidance, who will benefit from new empirical and theoretical advances in the study of the activities and strategies employed by international policy makers.