Land and the Quest for a Democratic State in Kenya: Bringing Citizens Back In

Kenya's current constitutional moment has included both the first popularly ratified constitution and its first postindependence comprehensive land reform policy. The roughly temporally parallel processes that brought about these two signal achievements have inserted the interests of ordinary Kenyans into this constitutional moment in a way that elections and constitutional ratification alone would not have, reflecting more than two decades of civil society pressure. The new democratized land tenure policy removes land allocation decisions from pervasive executive branch abuse and vests them in a democratically elected Parliament. In this fundamental respect, the Kenya constitutional implementation process appears to privilege procedural and deliberative democracy as the source of substantive democratic land tenure outcomes, and by extension, the terms on which Kenyans relate to each other and their leaders. Upon the outcomes of these deliberations may well hinge the future stability as well as the democratic quality of the Kenyan state.