What Counts as a Community Grievance? Delimitation, Dissent and Distortion in a Company’s Human Rights Mechanism in Kenya

Operational-level grievance mechanisms are often viewed as a means to empower rightsholders to access remedy for human rights abuses. This article presents qualitative research findings on Kakuzi’s ‘Independent Human Rights Mechanism’, a mechanism specifically designed to provide remedy for human rights abuses. Kakuzi’s grievance mechanism takes place in the context of historical land injustices, whereby thousands of squatters are subject to practices of enclosure—territorial, legal and epistemic—that legitimate Kakuzi’s authority over the land. The article takes an actor-oriented approach, following grievances across their full trajectory—from community members’ injurious experience, to those grievances heard by the mechanism, to representation of community grievances in corporate disclosure—while foregrounding the agency communities exercise in relation to the mechanism. The mechanism delimits which grievances are admissible and remediable. Communities dissent from this delimitation through various strategies. Corporate disclosure of grievances then distorts local realities.