Somaliland’s progress on governance: A case of blending the old and the new. *Document*

- This divergent trend of institutional development, a body of historical evidence and, not least, claims of independence and statehood by the Somaliland authorities have led to a significant and continued debate over the recognition of Somaliland as an independent state. Indeed, a substantial proportion of the available literature on Somaliland weighs in on one side or the other of this debate. Despite the arguments made in favour of Somaliland’s 1991 unilateral declaration of independence (or, more accurately, its dissolution of its union with the rest of the Somali Republic), other states, the United Nations (UN) and other key international organisations such as the World Bank have not yet recognised the polity.4

However, analyses of governance regularly apply to rule-based arrangements of economic, social and political organisation other than those of formally recognised independent states. Examples include evaluation at the subregional level (e.g. individual states or groups of states in Brazil and India) and in more informal organisational forms (as in Elinor Ostrom’s work on governance of communal resources, which was recently awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics). Notwithstanding the international community’s lack of formal judicial recognition, Somaliland has developed both its own structures of governance and a distinct identity suggestive of its ‘de facto acceptance as a polity’ (Huliaras, 2002: 174). While publications on the area by major international organisations state their adherence to ‘the principle of territorial integrity of Somalia as sanctioned by [UN] member countries’ (World Bank, 2005: 6), in practice they treat Somaliland as a separate entity.

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http://www.developmentprogress.org/sites/default/files/somaliland_report_-_master_0.pdf