Social Processes of Public Sector Collaborations in Kenya: Unpacking Challenges of Realising Joint Actions in Public Administration

Gedion Onyango ()
Additional contact information
Gedion Onyango: Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa, London School of Economics and Political Science

Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 2025, vol. 16, issue 2, No 79, 8171 pages

Abstract: Abstract Social processes behind the success or failure of collaborative implementation frameworks in African public administration contexts are under-researched. This paper addresses this gap by paying particular attention to trust attributes in collaborative implementation arrangements in Kenya. It shows how implementation challenges of policy programs and interventions may be linked to these interventions’ social characteristics in the public sector. The paper draws on a threefold approach of mutual trust and administrative data on public sector collaborative implementation arrangements for Kenyan anti-corruption policy like the Kenya Leadership Integrity Forum. Findings show that despite increased efforts to realise joint actions in public sector collaborative arrangements, they remain primarily symbolic and hierarchical and feature loose social cohesion among actors, producing challenges bordering on deficiencies in social processes of implementation. These include politicised aloofness or lack of commitment, unclear governance structures, coordination deficiencies, inter-agency conflicts, layered fragmentations, and overlapping competencies among different agencies. The paper recommends identifying and nurturing socially sensitive strategies embedded in mutual trust, like informal knowledge-sharing channels, to address primarily mandated public sector collaboration challenges in Kenya. Such efforts should consider systematic training and incentivising public managers to think outside inward-looking organisational cultures, allowing them to devise sustainable collaborative implementation approaches (promote open innovation) for policy programs, particularly anti-corruption policy.

Keywords: African public administration; Collaborative governance; Policy networks; Public authority; Regulatory policies; Trust (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13132-024-02176-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:jknowl:v:16:y:2025:i:2:d:10.1007_s13132-024-02176-5

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/13132

DOI: 10.1007/s13132-024-02176-5

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Knowledge Economy is currently edited by Elias G. Carayannis

More articles in Journal of the Knowledge Economy from Springer, Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().