In 2010, the Kenyan people promulgated a new constitution, containing within it one of the most radical experiments in devolution the world has ever seen. The proposition, of governance decentralised, challenges at a fundamental level the assumption that progress comes through centralised, bureaucratised statehood. Its alternative hypothesis is that one can avoid the perils of winner-takes-all politics by rejecting state centralisation as a necessary prerequisite to social harmony and economic development. The point is not how "strong" or "weak" a state is, but the degree to which politics includes and unites. State-building was about administrative consolidation for the purposes of economic development. Devolution is a return to politics as the best way of reconnecting state and society.