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international support and the promise of steering the county toward a green future. This is done by participating in high-level conferences, workshops, and training and constantly placing bids for said support.
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with a more holistic approach. So much money is spent on building institutions in the name of institutional capacity building. This includes training and building the capacity of staff members. Workshops, conferences, and training are held repeatedly in luxurious hotels. More money is spent on staff salaries and allowances. These institutions, the study argues, play a role in the huge amount of money. When you look at the institutions, they are believed to have the ability to solve problems. However, the study argues that the promises they carry with them are in most cases not realistic and meant to drive a narrative that they are doing something when they have their agendas. They serve a purpose that is different from their primary goal. The lack of a clear definition and the disjointed manner in which the ideas are implemented pose a challenge. This means that with many actors in the country, each of them applying their shade of green only translates to small bits and pieces here and there which does not amount to a collective vision as they are framed.
Having looked at green ideas of development in a broader perspective, I conclude that with the many attempted definitions by different actors, they remain empty in practice, are not very precise, and should be critiqued, especially at this point that it is enabling “empty gestures” on the part of politicians, political bureaucrats and other key decision-makers in Kenya. They however open several opportunities socially and politically.
The green concepts mean all things to all the actors and in this way, it is subject to different interpretations that do not allow for tangible. Its function as an empty signifier in Kenya has opened new possibilities for political action. It has found so much power in Kenya’s discourse on planning and is central to Kenya’s development agenda. As the study has observed, green visions are not easy to define in concise terms among the actors in Kenya. Most definitions emphasize development, which considers aspects of the environment. How this should happen remains open, which makes it an empty signifier. However, it is agreed that the country will maintain its carrying capacity in this way. What an actor refers to as green is not necessarily what they end up getting as a result of implementing a project, nor is it what other actors at different scales would also refer to as green ideas of development. The fact that the ideas are devoid of content allows their meaning to be contested, and those who speak the dominant language are better able to fix their purpose temporarily. Internationally, planners regard the ideas as primarily providing growth opportunities for future generations, which has been entrenched in the Kenyan development plans and agendas in recent years. The development initiatives that comprise the large-scale infrastructures all ride on economic development with
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aspects of environmental conservation in them. How and why is the concept of Green development steadily and quickly dominating in the Kenyan development and political agenda?
Brown explains that the process by which a signifier comes to dominate as representative of the entire system is subject to struggle, which is within the context of a field of uneven power relations. Like sustainability, Green development ideas remain empty terms in practice with no explicit content. This study contends that as empty signifiers, actors can use and misuse them as they navigate their interests without benefiting all.
These ideas have triggered some passion globally that have rendered the present trends as dangerous and a compromise to the future of humans. There has been an emergent discussion on whether the aim of green visions is appropriate for low and middle-income countries, and if so, what additional policies may be needed to foster such a shift in developing countries. This debate, Barbier argues, has raised concerns about several challenges facing developing countries in implementing green visions, comprising a large informal economy, high levels of poverty and inequality, weak capacity and resources for innovation and investment, and inadequate governance and institutions. Given these challenges, the question I pose in Kenya as a developing country is to what extent it can pursue these green visions without undermining its development agenda as outlined in the vision 2030. Green ideas of development can be important for developing economies only if they consider policies consistent with their main structural features of natural resource use and poverty. If green visions are relevant to developing countries, they must be compatible with the most critical d poverty alleviation's most critical development goal feature of green vision policies is that they imagine a degree of structural transformation and industrial development more appropriate to high-income and not developing economies (Barbier, 2016).
In conclusion, this chapter has shown that green development ideas are not a recent phenomenon. New framings emerge and this is what is new and is presented as a new way of Kenya’s future-making, yet the practices behind them are not new. Their aspects have changed due to the changing global factors and the emergence of new institutions. This study has also looked at the travel agencies of green development concepts and concluded that the existing dominant agencies who set the agenda. While some actors use these concepts to pursue their individual and institutional plans, others redefine these ideas and use the opportunities presented by the ideas for societal change.
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6 WHOSE GREEN IDEAS (UN)MATERIALIZE?
Futures do not fall from the sky; they are made by human beings (men and women). It is important to understand whose futures override other ones and why they are more important. I look at how green development visions create particular futures while un-creating others in the following. Having looked at Kenya in context and how green visions have been anchored, I now look at green visions’ (un) materializations. I look at how different actors work to ensure their visions become dominant.