Overview

Since the 2010s, there has been increasing interest in building and strengthening legislative capacity in public policymaking in Africa. This has come with a move toward creating evidence-informed decision-making mechanisms and data systems in the legislatures. African legislatures, especially in relatively stable political systems like Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Botswana, are intentionally investing and instituting solid evidence systems and capacity-building programmes for legislators and parliamentary staff to improve evidence-informed decision-making and legislative policymaking outcomes.

However, while commendable strides have been made towards this end, little is known about the interactions between actors, institutions and evidence systems and their impact on legislative policymaking processes and policy designs. This work investigates this dimension using a public authority lens in Kenya. It expands the ongoing discussions on African public policy discourses mainly confined to executive policymaking models and theories and the role of international development actors in policy change in the African continent.

Objectives

This study investigates the evidence systems, norms and innovations of the legislative policymaking processes and their outcomes in improving different policy designs. And how these patterns or define public authority in various legislative spaces at the local and national government levels.

The main research question is: Do legislative evidence and data systems and norms determine the quality of policy design and delivery in African legislatures?

Researcher

Dr Gedion Onyango

Gedion Onyango is a CPAID Investigator and research officer at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. He is a Lecturer of public policy and public administration at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, University of Nairobi, Kenya. He is also Afrobarometer’s co-National Investigator in Kenya.

Email: G.Onyango@lse.ac.uk