Beyond Failure Bureaucratic Labour and the Will to Improve in Kenya's Experiments with Universal Health Care

In a radical move that recalled the egalitarian promises of Kenya???s post-indepen-dence years, the Kenyan government recently made all public health care free, for residents in four counties, for a period of one year. Drawing on ethnographic research on these ambitions for ???universal health coverage???, this article follows civil servants tasked with the delivery of public services as they attempt to translate an experimental policy into practice and encoun-ter repeated and ongoing failure. These officials had long experiences of health system failures and did not expect success this time either. Yet, they planned and delivered interventions in a hopeful mood, maintaining a sense of purpose and bracketing a sense of doubt and cynicism. Utopian projects like universal health care offer interesting sites for ethnographic research ??? not only because of what they set out to achieve, but because of what they generate along the way, including hopeful engagements. I study how bureaucracy may be a site of hope and opti-mism in the post-colonial state???s capacity to improve lives, even while bureaucrats have ample experience of its failures. I explore how bureaucrats sought to engage failure and success as partial and productive, allowing a space in which they could deliver some form of public good.