The Local Drivers of Political Development Karol Czuba The Local Drivers of Political Development: Explaining Sub-national Variation in Government Capacity and Performance in Kenya Karol Czuba1 Abstract In 2013, Kenya devolved much of the political power in the country to forty-seven newly created county governments. Although the post-devolution political system is uniform throughout Kenya, the capacity of the county governments, the standard of public services that they provide, and local populations’ attitudes towards the state vary substantially across counties. This variation raises an important question that has recently attracted considerable scholarly interest: what explains local government capacity and performance in Sub-Saharan Africa? Existing scholarship attributes such sub-national differences to historical legacies, elite capture, central state favouritism, and ethnic divisions. These theories cannot explain, however, the variation between Kenyan counties where the postulated predictors of county government capacity and performance are identical. In this article, I argue that the varied trajectories of local political development reflect the competitiveness of local political arenas. Empirical analysis for this study draws on elite interviews, government documents, news sources, and a survey conducted in Turkana and West Pokot, two neighbouring and largely monoethnic Kenyan counties that—despite their similar histories, shared experience of marginalization and neglect by the national government, and other commonalities—have experienced the construction of very different county government apparatuses following devolution. I find that the variation between the two counties reflects their governors’ ability to contain political competition and address constituents’ needs and demands. The study contributes to the scholarship on decentralization and political development by demonstrating how local political conditions and local politicians’ actions mediate the effects of institutional change. Introduction In 2013, Josphat Koli Nanok and Simon Kachapin Kitalei became the first governors of Turkana and West Pokot (see Map on p. 2), neighbouring counties located in Kenya’s dry and sparsely populated northern periphery. The two newly created counties had much in common: inhabited by largely monoethnic and internally cohesive populations reliant on similar pastoral livelihood practices, indigenous governance systems, and other social structures, Turkana and West Pokot had both suffered a century of neglect at the hands of Kenya’s successive governments, which had never established meaningful presence in either area. The creation of the county governments led by Kachapin and Nanok—the result of the ambitious program of devolution initiated following the adoption of Kenya’s new constitution in 2010—marked a radical reversal of this pattern of marginalization. Elected by and accountable to their counties’ inhabitants, within a few years the two governors—both of them members of opposition parties—constructed, largely from scratch, new county government apparatuses responsible for provision of extensive public services never before available in Turkana 1 Sewanee: The University of the South, [email protected]. 1 The Local Drivers of Political Development Karol Czuba and West Pokot, which are both among the world’s poorest places. The rapidity and scope of this state-making process are no less remarkable than the surprising discrepancy in the capacity of the Turkana and West Pokot county governments, standard of public service provision, and local people’s assessment of the governors’ performance. Despite the similarities between the two counties, the quality of the well-functioning and popular state apparatus that Nanok built in Turkana greatly exceeded that of Kachapin’s corrupt, ineffectual, and poorly-regarded administration in West Pokot. Given the similarities between the two counties, the divergent trajectories of their political development since devolution present an empirical puzzle. They also raise a broader question: what explains local government capacity and performance? The considerable attention that scholars have paid to decentralization—a prominent, if not necessarily successful, solution to (central) governments’ inability to address citizens’ needs—has resulted in a large literature on the subject. Much of the existing scholarship focuses on political processes occurring within central governments and their countrywide impacts. The scale and rapidity of devolution in Kenya can be attributed to such processes. The 2010 constitution was adopted by political agents active on the national political stage with little or no input from ordinary inhabitants of the future counties or from local leaders. The actions of national governments cannot, however, explain sub-national variation in the dynamics and outcomes of decentralization exemplified by Turkana and West Pokot. Such variation is a common consequence of decentralization; its recognition has recently given rise to increased interest from scholars. Their important work attributes sub-national differences of this kind to historical legacies, elite capture, central state favouritism, partisanship, and ethnic divisions. These explanations cannot account for the variation between the two Kenyan counties: their history, ethnic composition, and relationship with the national government—including the incumbent governors’ partisan affiliations—are too similar. In this paper, I join the debate by identifying previously neglected drivers of local government capacity and performance. I articulate a theory of local political development that attributes the variation across local governments to the type of political pressure faced by local officeholders such as the Kenyan county governors and their responses to this pressure. Incumbent local leaders who wish to retain their positions react to the competition from other political agents and to demands from constituents. Depending on their vulnerability to both kinds of pressure, officeholders capture the resources of local governments for their personal benefit, channel private goods to clients, or provide public goods and services to local populations. These choices shape subsequent local political development. While elite capture requires no investment in organizational capacity, to provide private and public goods local leaders need to construct either patronage networks or apparatuses of the local 2 The Local Drivers of Political Development Karol Czuba government. These ideal-type processes and the variety of their real-world manifestations contribute to the variation in the trajectories of local political development. I make this argument by investigating the sources of the divergence between Turkana and West Pokot. The empirical analysis on which the paper is based has three components. First, I conduct a survey and construct an original dataset on the presence of the county government apparatuses across the two counties’ territories and local populations’ engagement with county government officials and political leaders. Second, because survey data are inconclusive, I review government documents, including the county budgets, to identify the patterns of expenditure allocation. Analysis of these documents offers a clearer picture of the variation in the capacity and performance of the two county governments. Third, to trace the political processes that led to this variation I conduct interviews with local political leaders, county government officials, and other well-informed individuals in addition to reviewing news sources. I find that, in Turkana, Nanok had a broad, well-established, and geographically-dispersed political base that helped him to outmaneuver political competitors but required him to anticipate voters’ needs and demands. To this end, the Turkana governor sought to provide extensive public services to his constituents and built a well-functioning administrative apparatus capable of delivering those public goods. In contrast, Kachapin’s attention was absorbed by the task of constructing his own support base, which he needed to compete with the extensive patronage network of his main rival Senator John Krop Lonyangapuo, who had sponsored the governor’s rise to power. To realize this objective, Kachapin channeled a significant proportion of the West Pokot county government’s resources to his new clients, limiting his ability to develop the administrative capacity of the county government apparatus and extend public service provision. In these conditions, West Pokot’s first governor proved unable to satisfy societal demands, eventually losing the 2017 gubernatorial election to Lonyangapuo, while Nanok was easily reelected. The paper makes three contributions to the scholarship on political development and democratization. First, it draws attention to the contemporary local drivers of state-making—and political development more broadly. It builds on recent work that demonstrates that political development can be shaped as much by local factors as by those in place at the centers of political power. It thus challenges the explanations that focus on such central drivers of political development. Second, the paper identifies the causal mechanisms—that is, local leaders’ vulnerability to pressure and their responses to that pressure—that shape local government capacity and performance. It reveals the important role that local political leaders’ relationships with competitors and constituents play