Beyond the Right of Access: A Critique of the Legalist Approach to Dissemination of Climate Change Information in Kenya

Abstract

Kenya has strengthened its climate change governance by developing national level instruments. Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration requires countries to ensure that each individual has appropriate access to public environmental information. Kenya has anchored the right to information in its constitution and the 2016 Access to Information Act. However, this legalist approach has left a translation gap since climate change information is availed in a form and language that is largely inaccessible to the public. To address the gap, this study reviewed the effectiveness of dissemination and access to climate change information among Kenyans as a measure of the country’s fidelity to the decisions of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other Multilateral Environmental Agreements, to which it is party. The study, guided by the diffusion of innovations theoretical framework and the encoding/decoding model, adopted a qualitative research design. Desk research and in-depth interviews were used to collect data. Results revealed that the current dissemination practices of climate change information in Kenya were not effectively reaching grassroots communities due to socio-economic and language barriers. The study recommends repackaging the information into vernacular and non-scientific narratives that resonate with the daily experiences of local Kenyan communities.