Kibabii University 1st International Conference; June 22-24,2016

Alexander K. Opicho

Abstract

Kenya as any other developing country is challenged in its politics, governance and public sector economics by a social vice of corruption. In the developing countries, most of the central government institutions are overtly threatened by corruption which is both deliberate and unconscious break down in human morals by public servants. This is a challenging situation to governance both at centralized and devolved governance. These in turn gravitate to undermine democratic processes in the governance structures. Leaders at all levels have accepted wildness of corruption in the Kenya’s governance system. Unfortunately, corruption as a social vice has been miss-understood as an isolated legal problem of the culprit. This is in stark contradistinction with a technical reality that corruption as institutionalized dishonesty is only a human expression of the systemic animal nature of tendency to dissemble or cheat as an ecological need to survive the competitive nature of biological and ecological games. Thus an act of corruption is an out-come of social-biological systems but not isolated legal problem. This paper therefore is focused on the intellectual need to explain human behavior of corruption as a challenge to devolved governance by using the mathematical model of game theory by applying the concept of prisoner’s dilemma.The paper will use a cross-sectional approach to examine 47 counties of Kenya that will be reduced to a sample of 30% of the target population from which data will be collected by observation and archival approach to analyze distinct game behaviors within the dynamics that accompany an act corruption in governance structures.

Key words; game theory, corruption, devolution, governance

Modeling Devolved Governance SystemsDownload Abstract