Boundary Conditions for Coral Bleaching Recovery Reform in Kenya: Process Tracing of Accountability and Implementation Failure

Repeated coral bleaching events on Kenya's coast have generated formal policy commitments to recovery, yet implementation remains persistently uneven. the present analysis asks why accountability mechanisms intended to drive recovery reform fail to produce sustained institutional change. Using a process-tracing design that reconstructs causal mechanisms from documentary evidence and institutional analysis, I examine the boundary conditions under which accountability for bleaching recovery operates in Kenyan coastal governance. The analysis identifies three interacting conditions that explain implementation failure: jurisdictional fragmentation between national and county authorities, the temporal mismatch between bleaching events and bureaucratic accountability cycles, and the measurement dominance of ecological indicators that obscure governance performance. Rather than treating implementation failure as a problem of insufficient political will or technical capacity, the article demonstrates how these boundary conditions convert formal accountability commitments into symbolic responses.