Communicative actions and intersectoral coordination in food system governance, in Migori County, Kenya

Abstract

This study investigates how communicative actions shape intersectoral coordination in Kenya’s food system governance, which depends on communication across multiple sectors. However, in Migori County, communication remains administratively siloed, making intersectoral collaboration difficult. Drawing on Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, the study adopted an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design, where the qualitative phase was followed by and informed the quantitative phase. This study was guided by two objectives: To examine how communicative actions shape the functioning of coordination structures in food system governance and to assess how communicative practices influence the participation of women and youth in food system governance. The total study population comprised 268 actors and 29 relevant policy documents, from whom a purposive and snowball sampling approach was used to select a sample of 255 participants. Thematic analysis guided qualitative interpretation, while descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and ordinal logistic regression were applied to quantitative data. Findings reveal that communicative coordination, though formally mandated, remains fragmented in practice, with weakly institutionalised collaborative structures and reliance on informal communication platforms. Secondly, the inclusion of women and youth is tokenistic, further weakening communicative coordination. These findings point to a central conclusion: communication is not peripheral to food system governance but foundational to it. Strengthening intersectoral coordination requires institutionalising communicative structures, joint planning mechanisms, and meaningfully inclusive participatory platforms across devolved sectors. The study contributes a communicative framing of food system governance theoretically and offers practical strategies for embedding communicative coherence.