The methodological backbone of the study is qualitative document analysis, a technique that allows researchers to extract patterns of institutional behavior from policy papers, project records, and publicly available reports without relying on interviews or fieldwork. Because the study relied exclusively on publicly available documents and institutional records, no human participants were involved and no personal or confidential data were collected, which meant formal ethical approval was not required. This documentary approach has particular advantages in fragile states, where insecurity can make direct data collection difficult and where the written record of aid agreements, development plans, and municipal budgets often constitutes the most reliable evidence of how governance actually functions on the ground.

The central empirical finding is striking in its clarity: collective action works, at least in the short term. Communities, local authorities, business actors, and transnational diaspora networks successfully mobilize resources, finance public works, and support infrastructure delivery through mechanisms that will be familiar to development economists everywhere: matching grants, co-financing arrangements, and participatory planning processes. In practice, this means that when a municipality cannot fund a water system, local businesses contribute capital, diaspora remittances fill the gap, and community members participate in deciding where the infrastructure should go. The result is a patchwork of locally financed public goods that emerges in the spaces where formal state provision is absent or too weak to reach.

This pattern is especially significant in Somalia, where decades of conflict, state collapse, and fragmented authority have produced what scholars call hybrid governance, a system in which formal government institutions, traditional clan structures, market actors, and international organizations all exercise overlapping forms of authority. Much of the existing scholarship on Somalia has catalogued the descriptive features of this hybridity, mapping who governs what and where. Dirir’s contribution is to shift the analytical focus from description to dynamics, asking not just how hybrid governance is structured but how it performs over time when measured against the actual delivery of public goods that citizens need.

Yet the study’s most consequential findings concern what happens after the ribbon-cutting. The research identifies severe long-term sustainability deficits that undermine the durability of collectively financed infrastructure. Lifecycle maintenance constraints mean that wells, roads, and buildings constructed through community mobilization often lack institutional arrangements for ongoing repair and upkeep. Land tenure insecurity creates uncertainty about whether the infrastructure will remain under the control of those who built it. Elite capture allows powerful local actors to redirect the benefits of public goods toward themselves. And structural governance fragmentation, the very feature that makes Somalia’s institutional landscape so fluid, prevents the coordination needed to sustain projects across political transitions and funding cycles.

The study’s most original theoretical contribution is what Dirir calls the state-cooptation paradox. The paradox works like this: subnational collective action effectively addresses immediate public finance gaps, allowing communities to obtain services the state cannot provide, but in doing so it simultaneously perpetuates long-term institutional mandates that properly belong to formal government and generates significant spatial inequities across regions. When communities learn to provide for themselves, the state faces reduced pressure to build its own capacity, and the informal arrangements that fill the gap become entrenched. Collective action, in other words, is both a solution to state weakness and a mechanism that reproduces it.

Compounding this paradox are transnational capital flows, particularly the remittances and investments that flow from Somalia’s vast diaspora. The study finds that these cross-border financial flows allocate resources based on ancestral clan geography rather than need, which inadvertently exacerbates regional spatial inequalities. Diaspora members naturally direct their money toward the regions and communities where their own kin live, meaning that areas with large, prosperous diaspora populations accumulate infrastructure and services while regions with weaker transnational ties fall further behind. The result is a geography of development that mirrors clan settlement patterns, hardening spatial disparities that formal fiscal equalization mechanisms, were they functioning, might otherwise moderate.

These dynamics have implications that extend well beyond Somalia’s borders. Fragile and conflict-affected states around the world, from Afghanistan to South Sudan to Haiti, exhibit similar combinations of weak formal capacity, strong community and diaspora networks, and internationally funded development programs. The Somali case suggests that international donors and development agencies should pay close attention to how their interventions interact with local collective action. Aid architectures that channel resources through community structures may achieve impressive short-term delivery but risk entrenching the very institutional fragmentation that limits long-term development. Conversely, programs that ignore community capacity in favor of building formal state institutions may fail to deliver services at all during the extended period required for state-building.

The study’s conclusion is measured but firm: while collective action effectively generates essential public utilities beyond state boundaries, its long-term sustainability relies entirely on supportive formal institutional frameworks, legal protections, and coordinated governance systems. Community mobilization can build a well, but only legal clarity over land tenure can guarantee that the well remains a public good rather than a private asset. Diaspora capital can finance a school, but only coordinated governance can ensure that teachers are paid, curricula are maintained, and the school serves all children rather than a favored clan. The lesson for policymakers is that collective action and state capacity are not substitutes but complements, each necessary for the other to produce durable development outcomes.

For Somalia itself, the research arrives at a moment of cautious institutional reconstruction, as federal and regional administrations work to rebuild fiscal systems and legal frameworks after decades of fragmentation. The study suggests that the country’s remarkable social capital, expressed through clan solidarity, business networks, and diaspora engagement, represents an asset that formal institutions should harness rather than displace. Whether Somalia’s emerging governance structures can convert the energy of collective action into sustainable, equitable public goods provision, without falling into the state-cooptation trap that the study identifies, may determine whether the next two decades of Somali development look fundamentally different from the last. The open-access study, published on 1 October 2026, provides a detailed evidentiary foundation for that conversation, and its framework for analyzing the lifecycle of community-driven public goods is likely to inform research and policy across the broader landscape of fragile states.

Subject of Research: Collective action and public goods provision under limited state capacity in Somalia

Article Title: Collective action for subnational public goods provision amid limited state capacity in Somalia

Article References: Dirir, M. M. A. (2026). Collective action for subnational public goods provision amid limited state capacity in Somalia. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04833-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04833-y

Keywords: collective action, public goods, Somalia, hybrid governance, state capacity, fragile states, diaspora remittances, community-driven development, elite capture, spatial inequality, qualitative document analysis, sustainability