Critical Discourse Analysis of Public Relations Messages in Kenyan NGOs: Legitimacy, Beneficiary Identity and Accountability (SDG 16 and SDG 10)

Kenyan non-governmental organisations communicate legitimacy, beneficiary identity and accountability through reports, websites and social media, and critical discourse scholarship shows that such texts construct social relations, yet no Kenyan corpus analysis was identified, a gap that matters for accountable institutions (SDG 16) and reduced inequalities (SDG 10). The study examines what published critical discourse and development-communication literature implies for Kenyan NGO public relations messages and derives a reproducible coding framework for future research. The study employs a structured narrative synthesis of 23 secondary sources guided by Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework, the discourse-historical approach and van Leeuwen’s social-actor framework, complemented by postcolonial theory, legitimacy theory and stakeholder-salience theory, and specifies a sampling frame stratified by sector, funding source and size. The results show that the reviewed literature converges on five expectations: technical and depoliticised vocabulary as a source of legitimacy, variable and often passive beneficiary agency, donor-oriented accountability framing, homogenisation of beneficiaries, and variation by audience and channel; zero Kenyan texts were coded, so no corpus frequencies are reported. The findings of this study suggest that these five expectations are falsifiable hypotheses for a purposively sampled, multi-coder Kenyan corpus, that a five-dimension codebook covering nomination, predication, agency, voice and differentiation, with two dimensions of low inference, one of medium inference and two of medium-to-high inference, provides a reproducible route for testing them across donor-facing and domestic communication, and that dimension-specific reliability thresholds are needed, with Cohen’s kappa reported for each dimension by at least two independent coders before full-corpus analysis. JEL Classification Codes: L31; Z13; O19.