Rural Interdisciplinary Sociology of Village Weather-Index Insurance Payout Verification Committees and Smallholder Claim Abandonment in Kenyan Dryland Wards: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Verification Thresholds

Weather-index insurance is promoted across Kenyan dryland wards as a substitute for slow and politicised crop-loss assessment, yet smallholders frequently abandon claims that appear eligible on the index. The argument is that the committee's threshold does not merely filter fraudulent claims; it reorganises the social meaning of a claim, converting an index-triggered entitlement into a locally adjudicated request whose cost rises discontinuously for households just below the cut-off. A regression discontinuity design is proposed to identify the effect of falling on the non-verified side of the threshold on subsequent claim abandonment, using the running variable of verified damage share and a local linear estimator with a triangular kernel. The paper specifies the identification assumptions, the manipulation and covariate-balance checks, and the interpretation of the estimand as a local average treatment effect at the threshold. It contributes a conceptual distinction between index entitlement and verification entitlement, and it argues that the sociological literature on village committees and the econometric literature on index insurance have each missed the threshold as the point where the two meet. The design is presented as a proposed framework; no empirical estimates are reported.