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

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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.