Designing Institutional Arrangements for Collaborative Governance of Forests in Kenya Using a Delphi Process

The focus of the study is to examine the institutional arrangement for forests governance in Kenya to understand the important design issues that can improve their performance in the delivery of sustainable livelihoods and conserve forests as they have been previously regarded as problematic. The study uses the Delphi technique to assemble information from 46 experts with vast experience in collaborative governance of forests in developing countries. The researchers then developed four questions which were asked across all the study experts. In the second round, all the expert responded to the four open-ended questions and all the qualitative results were analyzed manually by grouping them into interquartile ranges and only those issues that were above the 75th interquartile range were retained. In the subsequent third round of the Delphi technique the experts gave their answers, the responses were collated and returned to each respondent who then was invited to revise his/her estimates or to specify the reasons for remaining outside the consensus. In the fourth and final round, again, the responses were assembled and reported back to the participants to justify his/her position, whether or not he wishes to change his/her position. The results show that the Delphi technique has the potential for studying institutional design for collaborative governance of forests. The study recommends that the important issues identified can be used to help in the formulation of collaborative governance institutional design policies.