The return to Kenya is also the return to the question of what it means to build a life within a specific set of institutions — and what those institutions require from the person who chooses to work within them.
The Institutional Requirement of Home
The decision to return to Kenya — to make Nairobi the institutional landscape within which the next phase of the life is built — is the decision to accept the specific institutional constraints and the specific institutional possibilities of the Kenyan context rather than the American one. The institutional constraints are real: the governance challenges, the infrastructure gaps, and the accountability deficits that characterise Kenyan institutions are the daily operating environment for the person who has chosen to work within them rather than from a distance. The institutional possibilities are also real: the proximity to the specific governance challenges that the analytical framework was built to address, the network of people doing the specific institutional improvement work that the framework calls for, and the specific combination of capabilities and institutional knowledge that the return makes possible.
What home requires institutionally is the commitment to the long-term work of institutional improvement in a specific place, with the specific people, institutions, and governance challenges of that place. Not the abstracted advocacy for institutional quality in the developing world but the specific engagement with the specific institutions of a specific country — the engagement that is only possible for the person who is present, who has the local institutional literacy, and who has the long-term commitment to the place that the institutional work requires. The return is the decision to make that commitment. The institutional work that follows is the decision's content.
Home requires the institutional commitment that proximity enables and that distance prevents. The institutional analysis produced from a distance is valuable; the institutional engagement that proximity makes possible is irreplaceable. The return is the choice to do the latter rather than only the former — the choice to be present for the institutional work rather than only to analyse it.
Discussion