Quality Management Practices and the Performance of Renewable Electricity Infrastructure Projects in Kenya: A Critical Review of Stakeholder Engagement as an Intervening Mechanism

Kenya generates close to nine-tenths of its electricity from renewable sources, yet the projects that deliver and sustain that capacity display markedly uneven schedule, cost, technical and social outcomes. Two explanatory traditions have developed in parallel with little contact between them. Operations and project management scholarship attributes superior project outcomes to quality management practices, understood as bundles of leadership, training, process discipline, supplier development and measurement routines. Energy social science attributes the fate of Kenyan renewable projects to contested land relations, procedural justice, benefit distribution and community consent. The proposition that stakeholder engagement carries the effect of quality management practice into project performance has become a familiar analytical device in project research, but its evidentiary basis in the Kenyan renewable electricity sector has not been appraised critically. This review integrates evidence from operations management, project management, energy policy, energy social science and impact assessment to assess what can reasonably be concluded about that mediating pathway. Literature was identified through structured searching of open scholarly indexes and citation tracking, followed by verification of every bibliographic record. Four findings emerge. Quality management practice influences performance mainly through its behavioural and relational components rather than its documentary apparatus, which weakens the assumption that certification signals capability. Stakeholder engagement in Kenyan renewable projects operates through land tenure, compensation and employment expectations that lie outside conventional quality management systems, so engagement is only partly endogenous to those systems. Studies reporting mediation rely predominantly on single-informant cross-sectional designs whose causal ordering is unidentified, and the Kenyan empirical record on this specific pathway sits largely in outlets whose editorial standards cannot be established. Evidence for a full mediation account is therefore weak, while evidence for partial and conditional mediation is plausible but unproven. A conditional mediation account is advanced, specifying where engagement should and should not be expected to transmit quality effects, together with prioritised research designs capable of testing it.