Social processes of public sector collaborations in Kenya: unpacking challenges of realising joint actions in public administration

Social processes behind the success or failure of collaborative implementation frameworks in African public administration contexts are under-researched. This paper addresses this gap by paying particular attention to trust attributes in collaborative implementation arrangements in Kenya. It shows how implementation challenges of policy programs and interventions may be linked to these interventions’ social characteristics in the public sector. The paper draws on a threefold approach of mutual trust and administrative data on public sector collaborative implementation arrangements for Kenyan anti-corruption policy like the Kenya Leadership Integrity Forum. Findings show that despite increased efforts to realise joint actions in public sector collaborative arrangements, they remain primarily symbolic and hierarchical and feature loose social cohesion among actors, producing challenges bordering on deficiencies in social processes of implementation. These include politicised aloofness or lack of commitment, unclear governance structures, coordination deficiencies, inter-agency conflicts, layered fragmentations, and overlapping competencies among different agencies. The paper recommends identifying and nurturing socially sensitive strategies embedded in mutual trust, like informal knowledge-sharing channels, to address primarily mandated public sector collaboration challenges in Kenya. Such efforts should consider systematic training and incentivising public managers to think outside inward-looking organisational cultures, allowing them to devise sustainable collaborative implementation approaches (promote open innovation) for policy programs, particularly anti-corruption policy.