Devolution and Government-Citizen Relationship in Kenya's Urban Slums

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries II, African Politics & Middle East and North Africa Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries II

Abstract

As in many other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Kenya's urban population is growing rapidly. The implication of this is that the number of residents in informal settlements (a.k.a slums) is also growing rapidly. Near 30% of Kenya's population live in urban areas, of which the majority of the population lives in slums. For example, in Nairobi, 60% of the population lives across over 200 informal settlements. The dire poverty facing informal settlement residents and lack of infrastructure and social services in these settlements are well-known. If public goods and services provided by the government are lacking, what are the implications for the government-citizen relationship and for the government's tax revenues? The idea of a social contract (Tilly, 1992) suggests the strong state-citizens relationship is based on the social contract in which the government is expected to fulfill the provision of public goods and services while the citizens, in turn, are expected to fulfill their responsibilities by paying taxes to the state. If slum dwellers find the little provision of goods and services by the government, they may see the government as having less political legitimacy, leading them to not pay taxes. In addition, the economy of informal settlements is predominantly an informal economy, which is cash-based and therefore difficult to tax accurately (Ali et al. 2014).

There was, however, a major turning point of the government-citizen relationship with urban slum dwellers in Kenya. The devolution of power to local levels was introduced by the 2010 constitution and launched in March 2013. The devolution refers specifically to the decentralization of "political, fiscal and administrative" powers from the central government to 47 counties. (D'Arcy and Cornell, 2016). After devolution, informal settlements have become an integral part of the Nairobi county government. In this study, I examine the implications of devolution in Kenya’s urban informal settlements.

In particular, I explore how Kenya's political devolution in 2013 influenced (a) the living conditions among urban informal settlement (a.k.a slum) residents, (b) government-citizen relationships in urban informal settlements in Kenya, (c) individuals' willingness to comply with paying tax to the government and (d) the amount of tax paid to the government. To examine these questions, I propose to conduct an original survey and experimental research in five major urban informal settlements in and near Nairobi, namely, Riara, Mukuru Kwa Ruben, Mukuru Kwa Njenga, Viwandani, and Kiandutu. Considering the sensitivity of the questions (particularly the questions on tax compliance), I proposed to use list experiments, the methods used to mitigate the under- or over-report of respondents’ true behavior. I plan to collect a total of 1,000 responses (200 responses per each informal settlement) for this project.

These are critical questions to ask because a strong government-citizen relationship is an important component of state formation and tax revenues are a fundamental element of a government's sustainability. Despite the emerging literature on the impacts of decentralization, little focus has been made on urban informal settlements, which consist of the predominant proportion of the urban population in sub-Saharan Africa. Furthermore, the findings of this project will be of interest to county and national governments as they can point to an important policy prescription of improving the local government's tax revenue and strengthening the state-citizen relationship.

Author

• Hye-Sung Kim, Winthrop University