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

The research arrives at a moment when the question of state capacity has become urgent far beyond South Asia. Classic accounts of state-building, from Charles Tilly’s work on war-making to Fukuyama’s writing on governance and world order, have long treated capacity as something that accumulates slowly through revenue extraction, bureaucracy and coercive reach. Wealthy, well-staffed agencies were assumed to be the precondition for effective policy. Yet scholars such as David Leonard, Erin McDonnell and the ‘pockets of effectiveness’ literature have documented a puzzling counter-pattern: effective agencies and successful reforms sometimes flourish inside institutionally fragile states. The new study pushes this idea further by asking not whether such pockets exist, but what mechanisms allow them to emerge and to operate across multiple scales of government simultaneously.

To answer that question, the authors assembled three policy cases that span the full vertical architecture of Indian governance. At the national level they examined the National Action Plan on Climate Change, the flagship framework unveiled in 2008 that organized India’s climate response into a set of national missions. At the sub-national level they turned to law and order reforms in Bihar, an eastern Indian state that for decades was synonymous with poor governance before undergoing a striking turnaround in policing and criminal justice after 2005. At the city level they studied climate action in Rajkot, a fast-growing Gujarati municipality that developed a climate-resilient city action plan with help from international networks such as ICLEI and the CapaCITIES programme. Three cases, three scales, one central puzzle: how did low-capacity settings produce real policy outcomes?

The answer, the authors argue, lies in four interconnected strategies that recur across all three cases. The first is socio-political learning, the process by which policymakers absorb lessons from other jurisdictions, from their own past failures and from shifting social expectations, and convert those lessons into new policy designs. The concept echoes Hugh Heclo’s famous description of politics as ‘puzzling’ as well as powering, and the study revives that pairing as an analytical toolkit. Learning in weak states, the authors show, is not a luxury reserved for rich bureaucracies; it can be a substitute for them, allowing governments to borrow, adapt and improvise rather than build every institutional component from scratch.

The second strategy is what the literature calls puzzling: deliberate, iterative experimentation in which officials treat policy problems as puzzles to be solved rather than commands to be transmitted. In the Bihar case, police leadership experimented with fast-track courts, conviction-rate monitoring and organizational restructuring to attack a justice system that had effectively collapsed. In the national climate case, policymakers cycled through paradigms, from early framings that treated climate change as an environmental side-issue to later framings that embedded it within development and energy policy. The study draws on prior work by Deshpande and colleagues on India’s policy styles to show that this iterative puzzling, rather than any single master plan, produced the National Action Plan’s distinctive architecture of national missions tailored to different sectors.

The third and fourth strategies, political will and powering, address the political economy that surrounds any reform. Political will in the study refers to the sustained commitment of top leaders to back reforms even when they threaten entrenched interests, a factor that proved decisive in Bihar, where the state’s leadership after 2005 prioritized restoring law and order in a state long dominated by what commentators had called ‘jungle raj’. Powering, meanwhile, captures the mobilization of coalitions, resources and authority needed to push reforms through resistant bureaucracies and political networks. The authors show that these four strategies do not operate in isolation. Learning identifies what to do; puzzling works out how to do it; political will supplies the commitment; and powering assembles the coalition that makes implementation possible.

What makes the study technically interesting is its multi-scalar design. Most state-capacity research focuses on a single level, usually the national state, and most climate governance research either examines international negotiations or individual municipalities. By tracking the same mechanisms across national, state and city levels, Jha and Deshpande demonstrate that policy capacity is not simply a property that a government either has or lacks. It is built relationally, through linkages between scales. The national climate plan created frameworks and missions that cities could localize; international municipal networks such as ICLEI imported templates and technical expertise that a small city bureaucracy could never have generated alone; and sub-national reform in Bihar showed that a state written off as weak could reorganize its core coercive institutions within a few years when the political and bureaucratic incentives aligned.

The Bihar case is likely to draw the most attention from readers of comparative politics. Scholars such as Mukherjee and Moore have described Bihar’s incapacity as in part ‘by design’, the product of political strategies that deliberately kept state institutions weak to serve patronage networks. The new study does not dispute that history, but it documents what happened when the political calculus changed: fast-track courts cleared backlogs, conviction rates rose, and police reforms began to professionalize a force that had been deeply politicized. The lesson is uncomfortable for deterministic accounts of state-building. If weakness was politically constructed, it can also be politically dismantled, and the speed of that dismantling can surprise observers who assume capacity changes only over generations.

The climate cases carry equally consequential implications. India’s cities are on the front line of climate change, facing heat waves, flooding and infrastructure stress, yet most municipal governments have limited revenue, thin technical staff and fragmented authority. Studies by Bhardwaj and Khosla on how Indian city bureaucracies respond to climate change, and by Deshpande on municipal capacities under climate uncertainty, have described cities ‘superimposing’ climate tasks onto existing departments rather than building new institutions. The new research reframes this improvisation not merely as a deficit but as a strategy: low-capacity cities can assemble functional climate capacity by combining external network resources, national mission frameworks and internal learning. Rajkot’s climate-resilient action plan, developed under the CapaCITIES programme, illustrates how a mid-sized municipality can translate global climate discourse into a concrete local planning document without a large dedicated bureaucracy.

The authors are careful about the limits of their claims. The study is a qualitative case analysis built on published literature, policy documents and publicly accessible sources, and the authors state no competing interests. Three Indian cases cannot establish that the four strategies will travel to other weak states, and the abstract itself flags that future research should explore both the potential and the limitations of building policy capacity in weak states. There is also a normative tension the study leaves open: political will and powering depend on leaders and coalitions, which means the mechanisms that build capacity can also be captured by the same patronage politics that destroyed it. Whether learning-driven capacity endures after its political sponsors leave office remains an open empirical question.

Even so, the findings land at a propitious time. Donor agencies and international organizations have spent decades importing institutional blueprints into weak states with discouraging results, and the ‘pockets of effectiveness’ literature suggests the problem lies partly in ignoring how effective governance actually emerges. By specifying mechanisms, learning, puzzling, political will and powering, and by showing them operating across scales, the study offers a more actionable account than vague appeals to ‘political commitment’. For the growing community of researchers working on climate governance in the Global South, the message is particularly pointed: the capacity to act on climate change may not wait for the slow construction of a strong state, but can be assembled, case by case and scale by scale, by governments that learn faster than they grow.

Subject of Research: Building policy capacity across multiple scales of government in a weak or middling state, using Indian climate and governance reforms as case studies

Article Title: Governing across scales: building policy capacity in weak state

Article References: Jha, H., & Deshpande, T. (2026). Governing across scales: building policy capacity in weak state. Global Public Policy and Governance, 6(1), 66-81. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-026-00142-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-026-00142-2

Keywords: state capacity, policy capacity, India, Bihar, climate governance, National Action Plan on Climate Change, multi-level governance, policy learning, political will, urban climate action, public administration, Global Public Policy and Governance