"We are the Backbone of the Economy": Industrialisation and Resistance to Governance among MSME Manufacturers in Kenya

Sammanfattning

After independence in 1963, Kenya emerged as one of the largest economies in Sub-Saharan Africa. While manufacturing has been a stated priority of economic transformation across successive regimes, Kenya’s economy remained dependent on agriculture and service sectors. Manufacturing has been largely driven by micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME) manufacturers. Meanwhile, there is limited academic research on how these small domestic manufacturers navigate structural constraints and respond to them. This study argues that Jessop’s strategic-relational approach to the state, combined with the concept of resistance under neoliberal globalisation grounded from Scott’s infrapolitics, provides theoretical insight into Kenya’s development trajectory and governance within the industrialisation process. Through qualitative fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with MSME manufacturers and associations in Kenya, and adopting a critical realist view of resistance to governance. It reveals a governance structure characterised by the compounding of short-term selectivities with a low level of inclusiveness, in which manufacturers are included only thinly through a form of exclusion by neglect. This dynamic is disclosed by understanding how manufacturers, constrained by institutional exclusion and the triple burden of market disadvantage, ideological marginalisation, and political invisibility, reproduce those same conditions, mirroring the strategies of governance shaped by the government. However, the finding also reveals that manufacturers and associations who invoke longer-term policy horizons, cultivate trust-based market relationships, claim digital spaces as arenas of political voice, and promote institutional compliance are attempting to transform the orientation of this governance. This study demonstrates it by centring the voices and resistant practices of MSME manufacturers in Kenya. The framework of resistance to governance renders legible the hidden transcripts through which structural conditions are both reproduced and contested, insights that state-centric accounts of industrialisation cannot provide.