Greening Kenya’s Special Economic Zones and Industrial Parks: Achieving their Competitiveness in the face of Resource Scarcity and a Changing Climate Regime

Abstract

The culture of industrialization through special economic zones (SEZs) and industrial parks (IPs) is gathering momentum in Kenya. Increasingly, the Kenyan private sector is recognizing that SEZs/ IPs do provide an enabling environment for manufacturing comprising of energy, water, telecommunications, transport, and waste management infrastructure that is non-existent in other manufacturing locations across the country. Because SEZs/ IPs concentrate industries in delimited zones, their strict adherence to the ideals of resource use efficiency and eco-innovation as well as waste and by-product exchange through industrial symbiosis (IS) will enable them increase their productivity and lower their carbon footprints while remaining competitive. Unfortunately, the current master plans governing the planning, design, construction, and operationalization of the country’s SEZs/IPs are based on the wasteful linear economic development model of extracting raw materials, converting them into consumable products and discarding the resultant wastes into the landfill/ dumpsite. This traditional linear economic development model is characterized with linear flows of matter, where raw material inputs are mined, value added into desired products, made use of, and discarded with a trail of waste at every stage of the supply chain. Such an approach to economic development can only be sustainable in a situation where the country is endowed with endless resources for its increasing demand and that land is always available for waste disposal. This is certainly not the case for Kenya. As a result, there is emerging international consensus that over-reliance on …