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evaluated and processed, further noting that information that does not fit our frames is ignored or otherwise disregarded (Hall, 2016).
My focus is on the agenda-setting of power and the formulation of policy proposals; that is how problems are constructed through claims made in policy debates. To what extent is the global discourse of GE/growth incorporated into the conceptual framework adopted by the Kenyan government, and what does this say about how policy ideas move from the global to the national level? What set of actors support these global models of green visions/economy, and what do these actors tell us about the character of the Kenyan government? How, if at all, do domestic politics and distinctive historical legacies mediate the process of reception, revision, or rejection of the global discourses (Aminzade et al., 2018).
To give a summary, ideas are made to travel across the globe through an organized and active network of actors operating at the global, national, and local levels, each playing a role depending on their individual or institutional beliefs and practices.
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selective, coercive process by acting upon men’s habitual view of things, which alerts a point of view or a mental attitude handed down from the past—seeing each institution as imposing its pattern of conduct upon the activities of men in a manner consistent with the notion that institutions possess causal powers above that of individuals alone. Actors within institutional settings are assumed to be selfish individuals whose core motives are self-interest. Their preferences are determined by the institutional context in which selfish motives are pursued. It is within the institutions that actors get opportunities to travel. Here, there are several incentives to do this, i.e., getting a travel allowance shaping individual preferences (Bell, n.d.). The compliments and contrasts of institutions and human actions are forever remaking each other in the endless drama of the social process. Money is the most important thing here; as Hodgson argues, it is the most potent institution in the entire culture. It stamps its pattern upon wayward human nature and makes all react in standard ways to the normal stimuli it offers and affects human ideals of what is either good, beautiful, or actual (Hodgson, 2000).
Zapata Campos & Zapata draw attention to the fact that organizations respond to new ideas whenever they think the ideas are beneficial to them in different ways, rebranding and developing new initiatives and projects. He importantly recognizes that aid development agencies, for example, are compelling when bringing new ideas to the global South countries.
Their ideas influence management especially touching on the projects they fund. Following this, I note that the ideas that travel to the global south are implemented as per the donor's requirements and within their timeline. This is especially currently the case with the ideas of green development in Kenya. Other ideas involving public participation have become the normative of the agents, subjects of development, and internalized habits. Traveling ideas are dependent on those who transport and support them and how they are packaged, timed, and formulated rather than the ideas themselves. How they are taken up and viewed is dependent on their places of origin as well. For ideas, institutions, models, practices, or technologies to travel, they must be embodied, simplified, inscribed, and abstracted. The translation process involves disembedding an idea from its surroundings, packaging it into an object, then translating and unpacking it to fit the new context, which is then locally translated into a new practice. The final process is re-embedding, and it does not include the technology or idea but rather accounts and materializations of it into distinct local contexts and versions. Therefore, the travel of ideas aims at bringing about change and innovation through the adoption of new ideas. The metaphor ‘travel of ideas’ has resulted from a “diffusion” to a “translation” model
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whereby ideas adopted externally are translated, localized, and modified in the new organizational context (Zapata Campos & Zapata, 2014).
Simple compliance, appropriation, and assimilation of programs cannot reduce the travel of models and policies from North to South. Instead, development aid projects are locally contested and eventually localized, either covertly or overtly. New spaces in which local actors can create interpretation, adaptation, and twisting of these projects to fit local needs, meanings, and interests. Due to this, organizations such as local governments respond differently to these pressures despite being subject to the exact effects of institutional forces. Response of organizations to the travel and adoption of ideas through strategies such as compliance, compromise, avoidance, defiance, and manipulation. The emergence of inconsistencies with well-established practices and institutions can occur once local governments, communities, and cities have received these ideas. Decoupling ceremonially adopted ideas from existing organizational practices is adopted to resolve these inconsistencies. This practice is also known as “organizational hypocrisy,” and it refers to the act of decoupling organizational discourse from decisions and actions. For instance, the introduced participatory policy involving making models in municipalities has retained the decoupling of decision-making power by municipal politicians and officers with the participation of non-governmental organizations launched to gain social legitimacy. However, organizational change may have a consequential effect on day-to-day practices and formal structures due to decoupling adopted ideas from organizational practices (Zapata Campos & Zapata, 2014).
Institutions offer platforms where there are conflictual situations since there might be differences in values and how they are ranked among individuals. They change with time because of the desire for efficiency; however, attention must be put to interests as drivers of institutional existence and change (Spithoven, 2014).
Nation governments around the globe adopt similar policies despite very different socio-historical contexts. Reflecting the focus on the diffusion of western norms and institutional forms worldwide, world polity neo-institutionalism focuses on the similarities and not the differences (Aminzade et al., 2018).
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3 APPROACHING THE FIELD, THE SITE (S) AND METHODOLOGY This dissertation is part of project C03 Green futures, which aimed to answer three research questions: how are green visions translated into politics and projects, how green visions reconfigure environmental governance, and how particular regimes of translation influence the implementation of green visions. It aimed to contribute to Future Rural Africa’s overarching topic by analyzing visions of green visions and their translation into politics as specific forms of future making and as powerful drivers of social-ecological transformation.
I structure this chapter in two ways; the first part looks at the process of generating empirical data discussing in detail the research design, the process of developing research questions, how the participants and the study areas were selected, data collection procedures, and finally, my positionality as Kenyan conducting research in Kenya. The second part will focus on the methodological challenges, ethical issues in research, and the limitations experienced during the study. The data used for the analysis of this study have come from several critical recent government documents, frameworks, and policy papers. I also looked at publications from leading newspapers in the country, websites of key institutions in the green visions agenda, and social media posts of different actors. I conducted key informant interviews from 2018 to 2020 with several actors, including government representatives, NGOs (local and international), civil society organizations, foreign aid officials, youth organizations/ groups, and smallholder farmers. I analyze the data by closely interpreting the documents instead of a quantitative form of content analysis.