Kenyan Civil Society Perspectives on Rights, Rights-based Approaches to Development, and Participation

This 40-page paper represents part of a collaborative research project which uses the perspectives of a cross-section of Kenyan civil society groups to examine institutional arrangements that foster unequal relations. The paper seeks to explore the prospects for an integrated and sustained approach. Groups involved include the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Just Associates, and partner institutions in seven countries.

Excerpt from the Introduction

"This paper is based on a study that was carried out in Kenya between July 2002 and May 2003, which involved gathering and analysing the views of civil society organisations (CSOs) on current practice around rights, rights-based approaches to development, and participation. The purpose of the study was fourfold. First, to examine and highlight examples of country level practice around emergent rights-based approaches to development, going beyond conceptual debates and organisations’ policy statements. Second, to find out how these emergent rights-based approaches fit in with pre-existing approaches such as participatory development, and whether the new context enhances the possibilities for meaningful transformation of unequal power relations. Third, to examine whether there has emerged a convergence between the work of human rights groups and that of participatory community development groups as a result of increased overlap and co-existence of the discourses of rights, rights-based approaches to development, and participation. Fourth, to go beyond the perspectives of professional civil society groups to understand how the work of grass-roots movements relates to these discourses.

The post-December 2002 political climate is an opportune time for such an enquiry. First, because it marks roughly half a decade since international NGOs such as Oxfam, CARE and ActionAid – who are key players on the Kenyan community development scene – explicitly adopted policies to incorporate rights-based approaches into their work. Second, in the run-up to the December 2002 election, there was a massive nationwide civic education campaign as a result of which there is heightened citizen awareness of rights and demands for active and meaningful participation. These demands are directed primarily at government, but organised civil society has also come under pressure to re-define its identity and justify its role as a force for positive transformation of unequal power relations. Human rights advocacy groups, for example, have been forced to think about how their work could be more broadly participatory and rooted in communities, and go beyond a somewhat elitist macro-political level focus that largely involves “logging” violations and “naming and shaming” violators. Groups involved in community development have been forced to shed their “apolitical” stance and get involved in policy advocacy and in facilitating the creation of spaces for marginalised groups to be heard in governance structures at district and national levels. As a result there is emerging convergence between the practice of rights advocacy and the practice of participatory community development. Movements at the community level are at the stage of evaluating the spaces opened up by the new political climate, and crafting strategies on how best to exploit them. Therefore their demands for active and meaningful participation as a matter of right are gaining profile both in their relations with government institutions and with the professional civil society groups they interact with. At the same time they too are under internal and external pressure to look inward and address issues such as exclusion, and establish their internal legitimacy.

The paper is divided into five main sections. In the remainder of this introductory section we outline the methodology of the study. Section 2 then gives a brief historical outline of the political context in which civil society organisations in Kenya operate. Sections 3 examines ways in which practitioners of participatory community development are engaging with the discourse of rights, in particular rights-based approaches to development. We identify five ways in which this engagement manifests itself in the current practice of the organisations involved in this study. Section 4 examines rights advocacy practitioners’ engagement with the discourse of community participation and the influence this has had on their work. We do this through an in-depth discussion of two organisations. Section 5 examines the discourses of participation and rights from the vantage point of community-based struggles. We focus on the experience of two networks of community-based organisations. The concluding section sums up the key insights, highlighting opportunities and challenges that the post-December 2002 political climate presents for civil society efforts at translating these discourses into effective tools for meaningful social change. The methodology employed during the Kenya study combined semi-structured interviews with workshops conducted using a combination of techniques drawn from Participatory Learning and Action (PLA). The semi-structured interviews were carried out with 16 key informants drawn from 10 Nairobi based national and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) whose work cuts across the fields of human rights and development. The interviews focused on understanding how the different organisations describe their work in relation to rights, rights-based approaches and participation, and how, if at all, they put these concepts into practice.

The workshops facilitated participatory sharing, reflection and learning among three grass-roots based networks in Kenya’s coastal region, namely Ilimu Sheria (ILISHE) Trust (Mombasa), Sombera Dzumbe (Mariakani) and Ngua Mlambo Development Trust (Voi). In total we held five workshops. The first workshop focused on building rapport and planning; three workshops with each of the networks, and a joint reflection workshop at the end of the study with representatives from all the three networks. The content of the workshops was shaped by the specific issues that these networks have organised their struggles around, and activities that they had already planned to undertake. The ILISHE workshop focused on land and shelter struggles; the Ngua Mlambo workshop on communities’ rights to benefit from and play a role in the governance of natural resources; and the Sombera Dzumbe workshop on challenging the hierarchies inherent in communities’ relationships with development agencies and in particular with the Kwale Rural Support Programme funded by Agha Khan Foundation. The workshops employed a whole range of PLA tools for analysis. PLA tools used include physical mapping of the areas, resources and services to draw out the issues; historical profiles outlining major events and changes that have taken place and how these have shaped groups’ struggles; listing and analysing strategies used to engage with different actors over time; analysis of relationships with key institutions; action planning to identify and prioritise actions needed to address the issues identified."