Organisational Change. A Case Study of Kenya's Ministry of Land

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Politics - Topic: Development Politics, grade: 1,3, University of Duisburg-Essen (Institute of Political Science), course: Public Administration in an International Context, language: English, abstract: This paper is about organisational change in the Kenyan Ministry of Land. Organisational change is defined as a process of moving from one fixed state to another through a series of predictable and preplanned steps in order to implement changes in the governance, design and delivery of public services. These series of predictable and preplanned steps are, in my learned opinion, subject to an analytical framework that guides the organisation to successfully implement the change. There are very few studies on organisational change in the public sector, particularly in Kenya. Hence, this paper is a first attempt at examining the change effected in the organisation of the Ministry of Land in 2012 using Fernandez and Rainey's (2006) model as the analytical framework to analyse the change and discuss whether it was successful or not. It is important to note that little is known about organisational change in a public sector context because studies concerning organisational change in the public sector focus on the national level as a whole instead of specific organisational departments. Hence, studies tend to examine the transition of a centralised form of government to a decentralised one; or an autocracy to a democracy. Whereas it is difficult to pinpoint studies focusing on the organisational level by examining the change in the structure of a governmental department itself by scrutinising the changes in the relationships between different activities and members in the organisation; subdivision and assignment of roles, responsibilities and authority to carry out different tasks. Also, studies tend to emphasise on the content of change, rather than the processes through which organisational change is implemented. As a result, there is hardly any literature that connects the implementation of organisational change to the actual effects or outcomes of change.

Laila Abdul Latif is a corporate and litigation lawyer with Rachier & Amollo Advocates in Kenya. She holds a first class undergraduate law degree from the University of Nairobi, a Master of Laws in Public Finance and Financial Services Law from the same university and a Master of Arts in Development and Governance from the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. She has also trained with the University of Münster in Germany on international taxation. Her research areas focus around tax practices and their impact on African economies, Islamic law and finance, administrative law as well as developing a financing framework for the right to health for the African continent. She has a wide range of international experience having researched for the European Commission and the World Health Organisation. She has widely published on tax and issues surrounding the right to health. Lately, she is focusing on development and governance concerns in the African continent.