When policies fail to migrate: The stalled implementation of East African Community harmonization in education and labor mobility programs

Abstract

East African Community has installed one of most progressive policy framework of harmonizing education and labor mobility, yet all the visible signs points at ominously elusive implementation. This gap is precisely explored in the study, where the question arises as to why such well-developed policy models have such a systematic inability to be translated into actual structural cross-border education and human mobility. By adopting a stringent conceptual research design, thematic critical review of academic literature, regional policy instruments, institutional assessments were used to disaggregate underlying mechanisms that still sustain this implementation crisis. These findings create a worrying image. The facade of technicality in terms of implementation is actually good political theater because the member states claim to adhere to policies, yet in practice, safeguard national sovereignty through acts of legislative dissonance, institutional incoherence, and capacity constraints. This analysis revealed the role of variable implementation geometry in establishing a de facto asymmetry between member states, and the role of gaps in the evidence, which are handy ways of diverting attention away from failures in harmonization. The study provocatively redefines the concept of the implementation gap through theoretical perspectives of the Maitland’s theoretical ambiguity-conflict model, which places it historically in an institutional context. Hence high-level ambiguity and conflict is a rational policy tool of sustaining the perception of integration, yet national interests are not challenged. The study questions traditional integration theories based on Global North experiences, and asserts that an impasse of harmonization of EAC is not a lack of technical capability but a carefully planned sovereignty-saving policy. Such recommendations involve directly challenging political economy obstacles with the help of high levels of transparency, restructuring integration sequencing, as well as creating autonomous accountability systems. This research has a role to play in the field of monitoring and evaluation practice by revealing the inability of existing frameworks to encompass the political aspects of implementation and suggests more politically conscious ways of evaluation to differentiate between performative compliance and substantive integration. The study elicits a reexamination in the way regional integration is considered in the situations of revered national sovereignty.