Dismantling the Coast’s Development Engine: Why the Regional Development Authorities Laws (Repeal) Bill, 2026 Threatens Coastal Communities, the Maritime Sector, and Kenya’s Blue Economy Ambitions

The Regional Development Authorities Laws (Repeal) Bill, 2026, sponsored by National Assembly Majority Leader Kimani Ichung’wah and gazetted in June 2026, proposes to dissolve Kenya’s six regional development authorities (RDAs). Among them is the Coast Development Authority (CDA), established in 1990 under Cap. 449 to plan, coordinate, and implement integrated development across the six coastal counties—Mombasa, Kwale, Kilifi, Tana River, Taita Taveta, and Lamu—alongside parts of southern Garissa and Kenya’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

Proponents frame the Bill as a streamlining measure: the authorities have supposedly “fulfilled their mandate,” their functions overlap with counties under the Fourth Schedule of the Constitution, and dissolution will reduce fiscal pressure while transferring staff to the Public Service Commission and assets, liabilities, and contracts to the National Treasury. On paper, it reads like sensible governance reform. In practice, for the Coast, it risks creating a dangerous institutional vacuum—one that will set back coastal communities, undermine the maritime sector, and stall blue-economy development precisely when Kenya needs coordinated, specialized regional capacity the most.

Unlike purely sectoral agencies, the CDA was designed for integrated, region-specific planning that cuts across county boundaries and spans both land-based and marine domains. Its mandate explicitly includes long-range development planning, project initiation in agriculture, water, fisheries, environmental conservation, and—critically—exploration and sustainable use of marine resources in the EEZ. Over the decades, it has driven or coordinated irrigation schemes (Boji, Lake Challa, Chakama), water pans and dam rehabilitation in arid areas, mangrove restoration, coral reef conservation, climate adaptation programs, and emerging blue-economy initiatives such as agro-marine hubs, seaweed value chains, and coastal sea transport concepts.

These are not abstract bureaucratic functions. They address the Coast’s structural realities: vast arid and semi-arid lands, a 600-kilometre coastline, high poverty and unemployment, acute climate vulnerability, and a marine economy that remains drastically underdeveloped relative to its potential. The CDA’s regional lens allows it to tackle cross-county issues—shared catchments, migratory fish stocks, coastal erosion, mangrove ecosystems, and EEZ opportunities—that individual counties struggle to coordinate alone and that central ministries often treat as secondary priorities.

Dissolution would immediately disrupt ongoing projects. RDAs collectively manage hundreds of initiatives, many of them cross-border in nature. Transferring them to the Treasury or redistributing them among counties and line ministries risks delays, funding gaps, loss of institutional memory, and fragmented implementation. Coastal communities that rely on CDA-supported irrigation for food security, water infrastructure for drought resilience, and mangrove or seaweed programmes for livelihoods face heightened uncertainty.

Specialized local knowledge and community engagement mechanisms built over decades are difficult to replicate overnight within a centralized bureaucracy. The historical marginalization of the Coast—marked by the collapse of industries such as sugar, cashew nut, and bixa processing—makes the further erosion of a dedicated development institution particularly painful. As the Kenya Muslim National Advisory Council has argued in rejecting the Bill, dissolving the CDA would compound a pattern of institutional loss rather than revival. Youth and women engaged in fisheries, aquaculture, and coastal conservation stand to lose structured support for skills development, market access, and climate-resilient livelihoods.

While staff absorption into the Public Service Commission may protect individual jobs on paper, the conversion of a semi-autonomous, regionally focused body into mainstream public service risks diluting the specialized technical capacity painstakingly built around coastal and marine challenges.

Kenya has repeatedly declared the blue economy a strategic priority—the sustainable use of ocean resources for growth, jobs, and livelihoods while preserving marine health. The CDA has positioned itself as a key regional implementer: advocating for modern fish markets and agro-marine hubs with cold storage and processing; proposing structured coastal sea transport and cruise linkages; supporting seaweed industrialization; and linking ecosystem restoration (mangroves, corals) to tangible economic opportunity.

Removing this coordinating platform fragments the institutional architecture. Maritime and blue-economy functions already span multiple ministries, agencies (Kenya Fisheries Service, Kenya Maritime Authority, Bandari Maritime Academy), and counties. Adding the loss of a dedicated regional development body increases the risk of policy and project silos, slower decision-making on cross-cutting issues such as EEZ development, marine spatial planning, and climate-resilient coastal infrastructure, and weaker community-level delivery.

The Coast’s maritime potential—fisheries, aquaculture and mariculture, coastal tourism, marine transport, and emerging ocean energy or mineral opportunities—requires sustained, place-based investment and coordination. Centralization under the Treasury and generic public service structures is poorly suited to the adaptive, multi-stakeholder, and often experimental work needed to unlock that potential. Experience elsewhere in Kenya’s state-corporation reforms shows that abrupt dissolutions without robust transition frameworks can leave projects stranded and specialized expertise dispersed.

The government’s efficiency argument is not without merit. Overlapping mandates and constrained public finances demand hard choices. Yet efficiency that destroys functional capacity is false economy. The Coast’s development challenges are not generic; they are geographically and ecologically specific. Counties, while essential under devolution, vary widely in technical capacity and political prioritization of long-horizon marine and regional projects. National ministries operate at scale but often lack the granular regional focus and local legitimacy that RDAs were created to provide.

A more responsible path would retain specialized regional planning and implementation capacity—whether by reforming the existing authorities, creating leaner successor entities with clearer mandates and performance metrics, or establishing a robust, multi-agency transition framework that explicitly safeguards coastal and blue-economy projects, community programmes, and technical expertise. Simply repealing the enabling Acts and transferring everything to the Treasury treats the symptoms of underfunding and occasional underperformance while discarding the institutional vehicle best positioned to address them.

Parliament and the Executive should pause. Public participation must give genuine weight to coastal voices—county governments, fishing communities, women seaweed farmers, private investors in marine value chains, and civil society. Any transition must include clear ring-fencing of ongoing projects, protection of specialized staff, continued regional coordination mechanisms, and explicit alignment with national blue-economy strategies.

The Regional Development Authorities Laws (Repeal) Bill, 2026, in its current form, risks trading short-term administrative neatness for long-term developmental setback. For a region that has already lost too many engines of growth, dissolving the Coast Development Authority without a credible, specialized replacement would be an act of institutional self-harm. Kenya’s blue economy—and the millions of people who depend on the Coast’s land and sea resources—deserve far better than a vacuum.