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Kenya's horticulture sector is often heralded as one of sub-Saharan Africa's principal success stories. The country has become the region's largest exporter of fresh fruits, vegetables and cut flowers to Europe and the sector is a major source of foreign exchange, employment and poverty reduction. Generally, the existing literature presents this as 'a private-sector success story', whereby a supposed limited role for the state allowed the privatesector to develop independently and innovatively react to shifting global market dynamics and sourcing strategies of European lead firms. This reflects the fact that research on Kenya's horticultural sector has been dominated by scholars from a Global Value Chains/Global Production Networks (GVC/GPN) tradition, who tend to neglect the explanatory power of domestic political economy. This paper challenges these market-focused readings, arguing that the Kenyan stateand particularly the broader political context in which it is locatedhas played a more important role in Kenya's horticultural success story than has generally been acknowledged. Using an historicallygrounded form of political settlement analysis, this paper shows how domestic political economy and statebusiness dynamics have fused with the more transnational factors identified by GVC/GPN scholars to drive rapid and constant growth in Kenya's horticultural exports since the 1970s.

The success of Kenya’s garment export sector relative to other African countries challenges a growing pessimism regarding the prospects of devising and implementing industrial policy in contemporary Africa, particularly in contexts characterized by Competitive Clientelism. Kenya became sub-Saharan Africa’s fourth largest exporter of garments by value during the last two decades, catching up with major players like Lesotho and South Africa while converging on the two largest exporters, Mauritius and Madagascar. Nuancing existing explanations for the sector’s growth, which emphasize external factors like trade regimes and donor interventions, this article assigns a central role to the state and the balance of power that underpins it. The interests of key actors within Kenya’s political settlement aligned in a way that allowed the country’s Export Processing Zones (EPZ) programme to be relatively insulated from political pressures, giving the Export Processing Zones Authority (EPZA) sufficient autonomy and coordination capacities to administer a highly-conducive business environment for predominantly foreign garment firms. However, while the sector’s employment and foreign exchange contributions have ensured ongoing political support, the resulting increase in garment firms’ holding power has made them more assertive in demanding policies that are not only decoupled from learning processes, but detrimental to other industry players.

Both Malaysia and Thailand were seen to be part of the miracle growth economies of East Asia and fast moving into high income status in the early 1990s. Following the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of the mid 1990s, both countries have observed prolonged growth slowdowns. In this paper, we offer a political economy explanation of the growth slowdown in Malaysia and Thailand in their post AFC phases. We argue that the nature of the political settlement in these two countries determined a growth strategy that was predicated on offering deals in the export-oriented manufacturing sector that was accessible to most firms, at the same time, offering closed deals to politically connected firms in the natural resource and services sectors. As the political settlement moved to a vulnerable authoritarian one in both countries, such a dualistic deals strategy became patronage based over time and detrimental to growth.