- A society’s legal system is one of the major ways in which it expresses its view of legitimacy.
- Going forward, the policymaking process must remain alive to the subjective culture and values that inform the politics that drive the implementation process.
Image: PCS
From models of education funding, food security, industrial development, environmental protection, construction of social housing, health care provision, regulating financial institutions and public participation, the challenges we face as Kenyans are complex and myriad. As such, policymaking is pivotal in improving the lives of citizens through the identification of their needs and linking them to targeted policy actions as required.
Policymaking strives to create policies that bring the public closer to achieving the desired state or public goal. But, how does policymaking work? How does one navigate from the emergence of policy ideas to deciding between cutting-edge solutions? More importantly, why do policy ideas that look so good on paper fail to achieve intended goals? Why the apparent disconnect between policy ideas and policy outcomes?
There is now an increasing awareness that policies do not succeed or fail on their own merits rather their progress is dependent upon the process of implementation. Central to this process is the interplay of the politics of culture and values of the policymaker and the policymaking environment and process.
Culture is the set of usually unspoken norms and habits of behaviour shared by the actors in the relevant system that generates social action including policymaking. In this cultural system, symbols, narratives and language are crucial building blocks. Scholars give these cultural building blocks a central place in their explanations of why and how people define situations and prescribe appropriate behaviour.
On the other hand, value systems are the set of fundamental beliefs held by an individual or group. They determine what is valuable, what is fair, what constitutes right and wrong, who deserves what and similar ethical concerns.
Now, culture is central to determining the outcomes of a policy. Policy developers, media practitioners commenting on policy issues and academics evaluating policy outcomes and impact spend considerable time and effort in considering the merits of different choices.
For instance, is it better to contract out a service or run it in-house? Should a service be devolved to local communities to respond to their needs, or centralised to drive efficiency and fairness? Should the government give elected leaders money to provide bursaries or fund education directly?
In this policymaking environment, policy choices and outcomes end up not being driven by centrally specified approaches but instead by how the individuals interacting with the policy understand and define these processes. They will do this according to the prevailing political culture and their own values, perceiving and altering a central policy initiative through that context.
Indeed, decisions taken during implementation are as important as those taken by the policy ideologues that make policy and the existing culture of networks and institutions are central to shaping them. The eventual outcome of the policy is produced by these alterations and modifications, not by what was written in the original proposition announced at the centre. Indeed, this process of incremental decentralised decision-making effectively makes policy a matter of self-organising networks and complex systems rather than objective top-down decision-making.
Today, Kenyans are frustrated by the plethora of cases where supposedly market-based or technocratic processes are actually used to reinforce the existing positions and values of elites and insiders rather than the will of the people. Cases in point include procurement rules that are so complex that new entrants find them impossible, so called 'open' recruitment strategies based on a set of criteria that narrowly reflects the status quo, 'market-based' solutions that involve little competition and the state retaining all the major risks, 'broad-based' governance that turns out to be a cabal of tribal chiefs. Cultures of risk-aversion and protectionism have in these cases ensured that the policy choices made serve ends other than those for which they were designed.
Culture and values are important for other treasons as well. In democratic polity it is important that a policy is accepted as legitimate. In turn, what counts as legitimacy is closely bound to the values held by the population: what process of policy development is acceptable, how are people who interact with the state treated, what distributional consequences are seen as fair? A policy that does not consider these underlying values risks being branded illegitimate. When a policy is perceived as illegitimate it is unlikely to achieve its objectives.
A society’s legal system is one of the major ways in which it expresses its view of legitimacy. Kenya’s legal systems reflect the view that a fair process has an independent value, regardless of its impact on outcomes. The current legal challenges, in our courts, to policy decisions on the grounds that legitimate expectations around consultation were not met are cases in point.
The widespread acceptability of such measures indicates that legitimacy and fairness, concepts that ultimately rest on deeper cultural norms and values, are important in and of themselves. Going forward, the policymaking process must remain alive to the subjective culture and values that inform the politics that drive the implementation process.
The writer teaches Globalisation and International Development at Pwani University and is a programmes associate at DTM, a media CSO