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collective responsibility to increase the adoption of sustainable business practices and raise awareness of the circular economy and its extensive benefits.
Influential private sector actors often do not work within the multi-level futures governance and devolution processes but rather work directly with the national government, bypassing county governments. For example, energy provision is both a national and a county function; however, large-scale renewable energy investments are often negotiated only at the national level, even though the investment affects the county. As a result, the county and its population may not always have a say in investments that directly affect their environment or share their benefits.
Therefore, the visions materializing is not shared visions even within the private sector actors themselves, but power determines whose vision materializes in the end (Bellali et al., 2018).
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in developing policies that will help in developing institutional capacities resulting in conversations that will lead to sustainable lifestyles. This potential however has been influenced by interests that play out among the powerful actors, and most of them do not genuinely drive this agenda.
NGOs need to have a clear mandate and political goodwill to function and deliver on their mandates. In the recent past, NGOs have been driven by donors and powerful actors who have other interests altogether. Other challenges that NGOs face are a lack of understanding of their mandates by the public and civil society organizations. NGOs in Kenya are donor-funded; this implies that the donor organizations have a theme or program they would want to fund. This calls for the NGO to put up a proposal that is in line with the theme and the donor’s requirement at that time. The study argues that it is impossible that visions implemented are community visions in such scenarios but rather those of the donor organization. This was revealed by an expert who told me… ‘They will develop a program, like the CICs’…. After they have funded these programs, the NGO has to look for funding elsewhere, which means they always have to be aligned to the donor's requirements at that particular time. In this way, the dominant visions remain those of the donor organization.
We have different targets or needs, because in most cases, some of these projects we get, we always look at, maybe a call which has been made, because you will get different development partners who have different interests (Staff, SUSWATCH, Nairobi 10/2020).
NGO experts then prepare their proposals around the theme and funding needs of the donor. In the proposals, they give their ideas on how they think they would use the funds for the best interest of the community and the donor. So the projects and programs they implement on the ground are their ideas which they use later again as a baseline to seek funding from the same or other donors.
So you will find that any proposal or any kind of strategy that we’re developing will be aligned to some of those principles, the GE, circular economy, just transition, and the rest (Senior Staff, FES, Nairobi 11/2020).
Green visions of development that are developed at the international arena, such as circular economy, GE, green growth carry with them principles that organizations use to develop ideas that they intend to implement. According to an NGO expert I interviewed, these ideas influence their development strategies because they rely on donor funding, and since the donors would
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want to see an incorporation of these ideas into projects being implemented, they have no option but to incorporate the ideas to secure funding. It doesn’t end at that because the monitoring mechanism later on, towards finding out if the implementation took into consideration the principles of green development. In cases where this is not well taken into account, there is a possibility of not securing funding in the future.
We are a country that depends on donor funding, on grants from whatever countries and we do not have a standard that says as a country even if we are receiving your grants these are some of the bare minimum (Project Officer, GAF, Nairobi 01/2021).
Development projects in Kenya materialize because of the existing donor funding in the country. The revenue that the government collects through taxation in most cases goes into funding recurrent expenditure in Kenya. It is also argued that the informal sector drives a large part of Kenya's economy. The government doesn’t have enough data on the financial income from this sector, i.e. income from small-scale farmers, and this, therefore, makes it very difficult to tax this sector (Cheeseman & Griffiths, 2005). For this reason, the government of Kenya has remained dependent on financial aid from donors to materialize development projects. Being so reliant on donor support implies that it’s a challenge to determine what kind of projects the government would like to implement that will directly and in the short term benefit the people.
Still, rather they will implement projects designed by the donor organizations and in most cases with limited modification to suit the people. Some experts suggest that despite this situation, there is a need for the government to get to a point whereby they are not only swayed by what the donor organization needs but to put the interest of the citizens at the forefront. This way will help deal with white elephant projects that the country has witnessed in the previous years. The study argues that donor organization visions materialize through local and international NGOs that operate in the country; however, in most cases, this is not easy to know because as financial proposals are sent out, projects are already designed to fit into the requirement of the donors.
Now as a ministry, we said okay, we cannot do it alone, we must look for development partners so we looked for development partners and we are currently partnering with DANIDA (Senior Staff, MoEF, Nairobi 09/2019).
Senior staff at MoEF explained how things work at the ministry. About GGEP, whose implementation the ministry was spearheading, he argued that already the government has the agenda of implementing green visions of development, and their role is to look for partners to
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assist in the implementation. I however argue that the situation is relatively more complex than it seems. Institutions such as DANIDA that he referred to have their projects that keep evolving and implement them in Kenya. For this reason, the government collaborates with such institutions on their already existing projects. DANIDA also targets the government as a significant collaborator because these projects can quickly be taken up by influencing government policies. When I visited the ministry for an interview with the senior staff, I noticed the office was partitioned into two, and the other section was occupied by DANIDA’s senior advisor on GGEP who was from Denmark. This is not just for the sake of it but to ensure that projects are implemented as required by the financiers, which is Denmark. Therefore, I depart from the argument that the government has their single projects for the simple reason that they do not intend to fund those projects and therefore rely on the donor organization.