Gatekeeping beyond the state: The mombasa port development program and the emergence of the gatekeeper city

Abstract

Since the announcement of Kenya's Vision 2030, infrastructure provision has been cast as a central part of Kenya's development strategy. A key component of this vision is the upgrading of the Port of Mombasa, the largest and busiest port in East Africa, to international logistics standards. Analyzing the implementation of the Mombasa Port Development Program (MPDP), this article argues that it reveals a transformation of the politics of ‘gatekeeping’ - understood as the political contests around the spatial and institutional sites that mediate the circulation of resources between domestic and international political-economic spheres. The controversies surrounding the management of the MPDP reveal how gatekeeping has undergone a process of decentralization, that results in arenas of gatekeeper competition multiplying at the intersection of new institutional and spatial sites of political contestation. The article demonstrates how gatekeeping now increasingly encompasses complex interactions between peripheral city-level actors and international state and non-state actors. Spatially, it emphasizes how gatekeeping contests crystallize around Mombasa's logistics sector, due to the port city's position as a crucial gateway linking the hinterland to global trade networks. This, I argue, is transforming Mombasa into a gatekeeper city understood as an urban space of transboundary logistical entanglements, where a variety of spatial practices encounter, and reconfigure the modalities of gatekeeping.