Rural Interdisciplinary Sociology of Climate-Smart Village Committee Selection Rules and Drought-Resistant Seed Uptake in Kenyan ASAL Wards: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Nomination Thresholds

Climate-smart village committees in Kenya's arid and semi-arid lands allocate drought-resistant seed through nomination rules that specify minimum thresholds of household participation in communal adaptation activities. The framework specifies a sharp regression discontinuity design in which households just above and just below the nomination threshold are compared on seed uptake, with the threshold as the forcing variable and uptake as the outcome. The design is proposed rather than executed: no household-level data are analysed here. The paper's contribution is to formalise the sociological mechanism by which nomination thresholds reproduce participation inequalities, to specify the identifying assumptions under which a regression discontinuity analysis would recover the threshold effect, and to derive testable propositions about the conditions under which the discontinuity is likely to be substantively large. The framework is illustrated with reference to the institutional architecture of Kenyan ASAL wards and to comparative evidence on committee-based targeting in East African community organisations. Nomination thresholds are not neutral administrative devices but sociological selection mechanisms whose effects on seed uptake depend on the correlation between participation and unobserved household characteristics, and it identifies the boundary conditions under which regression discontinuity estimates would and would not support causal inference.