Boundary Conditions for Corruption Public Procurement Reform in Kenya: Process Tracing of Accountability and Implementation Failure

Kenya's public procurement reforms, particularly the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act of 2015, were designed to curb corruption through enhanced accountability mechanisms. Yet, their implementation has produced uneven results, with corruption persisting despite robust legal frameworks. the present analysis argues that the failure is not primarily a deficit of legal design but a consequence of specific boundary conditions that constrain the operation of accountability mechanisms. Through a process-tracing analysis of the reform's implementation, the article identifies three critical boundary conditions: the political economy of elite interests that capture oversight institutions, the administrative capacity deficits that undermine the technical functioning of e-procurement systems, and the weak linkage between formal accountability procedures and informal sanctioning mechanisms. The analysis demonstrates that accountability instruments function only when these boundary conditions are aligned, suggesting that procurement reform success is contingent on addressing the underlying distribution of power and administrative realities.