Returning to Nairobi after fourteen years in the United States is not only a personal homecoming. It is an encounter with a set of institutions — and the gap between what they are and what they could be — that the years away made newly visible.
The Returning Gaze
The person who returns to a city after a long absence sees it differently from the person who never left — not because the returnee has better judgment but because the absence has provided the comparative framework that proximity obscures. The institutional landscape of Nairobi that I encountered on returning in April 2025 was familiar in its specific features and newly analytical in my engagement with it: the institutions that I had grown up navigating as the natural order of things were now visible as institutional choices, with the accountability gaps, the captured interests, and the design features that institutional analysis makes legible.
The Nairobi institutional landscape is, in many dimensions, the institutional analysis of this blog made concrete in a specific city: the coordination challenges of a rapidly growing metropolis with institutional capacity that has not kept pace with the population, the informality that fills the gaps that formal institutions leave, the political economy that shapes resource allocation in ways that reflect the interests of those with access to political institutions rather than the development needs of the populations those institutions are supposed to serve, and the genuine innovation in specific institutional domains — mobile money, community health, small business finance — that has occurred precisely because the formal institutional system created spaces where informal institutional solutions could develop.
Nairobi is not an institutional failure. It is an institutional landscape in which the gap between what institutions could do and what they currently do is larger than in the places I lived for fourteen years — and in which the potential for institutional improvement, precisely because the starting point is lower, is correspondingly larger. The analytical framework that five years of writing has developed is most needed in the places where the distance between institutional aspiration and institutional reality is greatest.
Discussion