After years of working with the Federal Government of Somalia and the Federal Member States to build resilient, self-sustaining, and people-centered institutions, international supporters of institutional reform have largely faced consistent failure. As this lack of tangible results and subsequent fatigue frustrated international partners, a gradual shift toward prioritizing subnational and local actors began gaining momentum. This “turn to the local” a prominent approach in post-conflict peacebuilding was not initially implemented as a direct policy intervention in Somalia. Even the Obama administration’s 2010 “Dual-Track” policy, which contained elements of local engagement, ultimately stopped at the federal and state levels without ever reaching the district tier. However, despite these historical limitations and a rapidly changing funding landscape, the “turn to the local” has recently accelerated, with several major donors increasingly prioritizing direct collaboration with local actors.

The Somali provisional constitution mentions local government in just one passing article (Article 48). This article folds the formation and operationalization of local governments and their legislation oversight to the mandates of FMS. As a result, concerted efforts to form local government proliferated across the south central Somalia. Support from the states and international donors were mobilized to form district administrations within the country’s pre-1991 districts. Local communities were convinced that local governments would attract donor funding and improve public service delivery. However, these grassroot systems were rapidly hijacked by the state authorities, who started appointing loyal mayors who are answerable to state capitals rather than to their local constituents. Yet, despite the pervasive political capture and fiscal dependency that have crippled local government across the country, international partners, local communities, and the diaspora have maintained their faith in these structures. They remained hopeful that as state institutions mature and democratic processes take root, local governments would become the single most important tier which will not only deliver service but also rebuild Somalia’s deeply eroded citizen trust and institutional legitimacy.

However, the current disputed election cycle is seemingly throwing that hope into deeper water. Somali local governance has shifted from a system where individuals would sell land to contest a seat during indirect elections to something that is barely discussed in the ongoing state elections. According to a 2024 field study by the Somali Public Agenda, one such case occurred in Bardale, South West State, where a mayoral candidate reportedly sold his property and business to contest an indirect local election—only to learn later that the seat carried no meaningful authority or income. Similarly, in Adaado, Galmudug, the same research documented a civil servant who resigned from a $700-a-month federal job on the expectation of a $2,000 council salary that never materialized.

Today, even as local elections transition toward direct, one-person-one-vote elections, almost no one is selling their assets to run anymore. Why? Because communities have learned a painful lesson that there is simply nothing to manage at the local level, regardless of the seat one occupies. In the span of just a few years, local government has fallen from an office which is highly sought after to a tier of governance barely worth public attention.

Are Federal Member State leaders treating this critical governance tier as a network of patronage instruments rather than institutions capable of increasing their revenue, resolving local disputes before they escalate, delivering basic services, and reviving eroded public trust? The answer is seems yes. Unfortunately, in Somalia short-term political gain always outweighs long-term institutional benefits.

But the local issue is beyond this election. In order to make real sense of this crisis we should read with Somalia’s unresolved constitutional and federalism models. Even after more than a decade of institution-building and multiple changes of federal administration, the division and devolution of powers and resources between the FGS and the FMS remain deeply contested. This instability is continuously evidenced by the current disagreement between Jubaland, Puntland and opposition groups over constitutional reviews, electoral frameworks, resource sharing, and security modalities. Yet, while these contentious issues must be addressed, the overarching constitutional conundrum always misses an equally important and much deeper decentralization issue: the FMS-local relationship.

Even if the FGS-FMS dispute were completely resolved tomorrow, the FMS would still retain their incentive to manipulate and fiscally starve local governments for as long as local governance continues to be designed around the constitution rather than designed into it.

The remedy is therefore not to wait passively for Somalia’s institutions to mature with time, as some reformists would claim; it is to legally guarantee local governments a seat at the negotiating table by law, not folding their fate on FMS’s. for local governments to live up to their full potential, they require three concrete mechanisms: a constitutional amendment granting them a clear and well-articulated operational mandate; a binding fiscal transfer formula that ends their crippling financial dependency; and an external monitoring mechanism to make continuous state-level manipulation harder to conceal. Unless local government the crucial third tier of Somalia’s governance structure is permanently embedded into the constitution as an entity independent from FMS manipulation and fiscal starvation, it will remain exactly what the state electoral patterns show it to be: an afterthought level of government that no one bothers to talk about.