THE UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG

initial conditions, path dependence, and cultural beliefs are allowed to play a significant role
in selecting the equilibrium.
We have highlighted the importance of interactions between formal and informal systems
especially the initial rule conditions, rule protestation, participation and the problem of
ranking. All these have a great impact on the institutional path.
Stage 3: Need for intuitional mediation
At this stage we realise that there is need for technical evaluation of institutions. This
evaluation would take into account the political, social, as well as the economic understanding
of resource regimes. The evaluation of institutions is necessary so as to assess their
effectiveness in achieving their goals. Like we have earlier suggested, genuine participation in
the form of public deliberation should not be taken for granted when we talk of meaningful
and durable institutional mediation. Our analysis indicates that there is no such a thing as
genuine institutional mediation in Kenya. A purely “technical” assessment of institutions is a
necessary prerequisite in order to avoid the above institutional dilemmas we have indicated.
For example, we have identified a series of obstacles that institutions continue to face in the
context of Kakamega. Our analysis further revealed that there have been no important feedback
channels between the institutional making machinery at the national/sub-national level
and implementation outcomes at the local level and that, as a result, the framed formal
institutions have suffered significant challenges, hence the institutional dilemmas.
Therefore in order to highlight the importance of institutionalised participation in the form of
a shared learning process, the figure points out that there are feedback mechanisms that need
to be instituted. We consider, however, that these feedback mechanisms can be effectively
utilized. We believe that the biodiversity crisis in Kenya and the Kakamega scenario in
particular presents great stock of accumulated knowledge in form of a cause and effect
analysis. However, this knowledge has not been properly incorporated into the stock of the
institutional reforms that have been drawn. Much of the findings on the results of institutional
reforms in Kenya reveal that most of the reforms were executed outside the intensions of real
institutional mediation but rather conducted in the ambit of multilateral institutions which
have a tendency to focus on common features and to reject the idiosyncratic ones. Therefore
because the incentives to institutional framing are variegated, in the corresponding rectangles
we included the need to re-shape, re-examine and re-rank institutional inputs after getting
feedback from shared learning and participation. Most importantly we point out that external
pressure, and “endogenous” feedback from elsewhere in the system, ought to be processed
here before exit to the public. In sum we must re- emphasise that analytical efforts of the
decision-making machinery at the state level tends to give a blind eye on local actors, a fact
which keeps the local notions basically missing, even though it is important to ensure the
consistency between national level institutions and local practices at the local level.
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