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The article draws academic attention to capture risks in the regulatory statutes that may lead to capture by regulators. It takes a practical outlook of Kenya for empirical demonstration of the statute-based capture risks. The article uses the Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) framework to identify the risk factors in the regulatory environment for professions involved in real estate development, that is, architects, engineers and quantity surveyors. The OECD Reference Checklist for Regulatory Decision-making is used as a reference point in identifying risk analysis as a candidate of inclusion in the checklist for purposes of improvement in regulatory outcomes. Document analysis is used to make observations on the statutes and generate data for qualitative analysis and interpretation. Capture risks are identified in terms of composition of regulatory boards that include powerful public servants. Exclusion of relevant stakeholders in the regulation of professions, inclusion of extraprofessional regulations and uncontrolled legislative powers are other sources of risk of regulatory capture. The article gives central focus to the capture by regulators. Existing regulatory capture literature predominantly consider regulatory capture by private or special interest groups.

AbstractAs the world gropes for an understanding of and solutions to poverty, one of its typologies that has come to the fore is housing poverty. Housing poverty afflicts developing countries in particular, and solving it may bring about solutions to other forms of poverty. One of the strategies that can be used to promote the understanding of housing poverty, and hence show the way to its reduction, is the decennial census of housing. This essay intends to determine whether the decennial census of housing can be used as a strategy for the reduction of housing poverty in Kenya. It evaluates the whole census business and recommends that some of the missing UN‐recommended housing topics be incorporated in order to give a complete picture of housing poverty in the country. It also recommends that the analysis and reporting of the census survey should be more sensitive to the geographical and social extents of housing poverty. This would transform the decennial census of housing into an effective strategy for poverty reduction in Kenya and, for that matter, in any developing country in the world.RésuméTandis que le monde cherche à comprendre la pauvreté et à lui trouver des solutions, l'une des typologies manifeste aujourd'hui est la pauvreté du logement. Elle affecte notamment les pays en développement et sa résolution pourrait permettre de résoudre d'autres formes de pauvreté. L'une des stratégies qui servirait à faciliter la compréhension de ce type de pauvreté, donc à ouvrir la voie vers son recul, est le recensement décennal de l'habitat. Cet article vise àétablir si un recensement décennal de l'habitat pourrait servir de stratégie pour le recul de la pauvreté du logement au Kenya. Il évalue l'ensemble de l'activité de recensement et conseille que certaines rubriques de logement qui manquent dans les recommandations de l'ONU soient intégrées afin de donner une image complète de la pauvreté du logement national. De plus, il propose que l'analyse et le compte rendu du recensement tiennent davantage compte des champs géographiques et sociaux de la pauvreté du logement. Cela ferait du recensement décennal de l'habitat une stratégie efficace de diminution de la pauvreté au Kenya et, d'ailleurs, dans tout autre pays en développement au monde.

The County Government of Nairobi faces a myriad of capacity challenges that have impeded fire disaster management in the City. This is further compounded by the lack of a comprehensive legal and institutional framework for disaster management in Kenya. Whereas the County Government enlists assistance from other public, private and civil society organizations, the approach employed is skewed towards interagency coordination rather than a collaborative approach. This paper looks at the concept of collaboration and its overall application in disaster management. It gives an overview of the Kenyan situation in relation to fire disaster management in Nairobi. The paper indicates that the County Government the County government has no framework for inter-agency collaboration thus fire disaster operations involve coordination of the different agencies by either the County government or the National Disaster Operations Centre. This means that the interaction between the agencies involved is one in which formal linkages are mobilized because some assistance is required for fire disaster response rather than a joint decision making approach where power is shared and all agencies take collective responsibility. The paper concludes that given the County government's inadequate capacity for fire disaster management, there is need to embrace inter-agency collaboration to enhance fire disaster management in the city. It thus recommends the formulation and adoption of a fire disaster management policy; formulation and implementation of fire disaster management legislation; fostering partnerships with the private sector through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs); and the development of an interagency fire management program/plan, as suggestions to augment inter-agency collaboration for fire disaster management.

This paper converts the six reasons for inclusive development proposed by Gupta into a heuristic device for evaluation of inclusive development in road infrastructure projects in Nairobi. The Gupta Rationale entails six key evaluative elements of, that is, whether the project has achieved: Welfare of the poor and marginalized, Human rights, Economic Sustainability, Human security and livelihood support, Inclusive decision-making and Non production of poverty. This study subjected the Nairobi-Thika Road Improvement Project to this evaluative criterion as case study. The results of the evaluation are that the project mainly focused on enhancing the comfort of the private motorist, no serious violations except on few occasions when structures used by informal SMEs were demolished without offers of viable alternatives, the project led to improved infrastructure with significant economic benefits, densification and crowding occasioned by high land prices has led to overstretched infrastructural services thereby threatening the human security in the neighbourhoods along the corridor, the project was not inclusive in terms of decision-making but was a top-down outfit that did little to incorporate local governments and communities, and that it caused production of poverty by destroying livelihoods of petty traders and employees of SMEs that were operating along the corridor. The paper demonstrates that the Gupta Rationale can clearly assess the extent of inclusive development in a project and help to reach the conclusion as to whether a particular project's processes and outcomes engender inclusive development. In the case of Nairobi, for instance, the device has helped reach a rational decision that development is not inclusive. Recommendation is made that the Gupta Rationale should be used in the ex-ante and ex-post evaluation of road improvement projects or any other urban development project for that matter. This would help mainstream inclusive urban development.