The decision to return to Kenya after fourteen years in the United States is not only a personal choice. It is an institutional act with institutional consequences.
The Decision's Institutional Dimension
The return of a member of the diaspora to their country of origin is, in the development economics literature, one of the most consequential human capital transfers available in the development toolkit — more consequential per person than the remittances that command more attention, because the returning diaspora member brings not only financial capital but the accumulated human capital, the institutional knowledge, and the professional networks that a career in a more institutionally developed context produces. The decision to return is therefore not only a personal decision about where to live — it is an institutional decision about where to deploy the specific combination of capabilities that the migration and the career abroad have produced.
The institutional act of return carries specific practical challenges that the personal framing does not fully capture. The re-entry into the Kenyan institutional landscape after fourteen years in the American one requires the reconstruction of the institutional literacy — the knowledge of how things actually work, who the relevant actors are, and what the specific constraints and opportunities of the institutional environment are — that fourteen years away have partially eroded. The professional networks that were built in the United States must be translated into the Kenyan professional context where the networks are different and the institutional access they provide is different. And the institutional knowledge accumulated in the American context must be adapted to the Kenyan institutional conditions rather than applied wholesale in ways that the transfer critique of development assistance would predict would fail.
Return is an institutional act that requires the institutional work of re-entry: rebuilding the institutional literacy, reconstructing the local networks, and adapting the capabilities built elsewhere to the specific institutional conditions of the place returned to. The diaspora member who does this work well is the diaspora member whose return produces the institutional value that the development literature identifies as the return's potential contribution. The one who does not has returned personally without returning institutionally.
Discussion