J. of Modern African Studies, , (), pp. – © Cambridge University Press . This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/./), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:./SXX Decentralisation in Kenya: the governance of governors* NIC CHEESEMAN Department of Politics and International Relations and African Studies Centre, University of Oxford, Bevington Road, Oxford OXLH, United Kingdom Email:
[email protected] GABRIELLE LYNCH Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick, Social Sciences Building, Coventry CVAL, United Kingdom Email:
[email protected] and JUSTIN WILLIS Department of History, Durham University, North Bailey, Durham DHEX, United Kingdom Email:
[email protected] ABSTRACT Kenya’s March elections ushered in a popular system of devolved govern- ment that represented the country’s biggest political transformation since inde- pendence. Yet within months there were public calls for a referendum to * 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 decentralisation’. Two anonymous reviewers and the editors of JMAS provided comments and suggestions that have significantly improved the quality of the manuscript. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.226, on 01 Oct 2021 at 23:04:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.