From trust to oligopoly institutional change in livestock trade in Somaliland (2025)

From trust to oligopoly: institutional change in livestock trade in Somaliland after 1991

Working Paper, 2019

From the 1980s on Somalia was in the grip of a looming civil war and formal institutions were weak and corrupt, which affected livestock exports. Livestock exports from northern Somalia, now Somaliland, resumed in the early 1990s in the absence of formal institutions and by late 1990, they were back in full swing. Some have made assumptions about the performance of informal institutions in the economy by interpreting the increase in the number of livestock exports from the port of Berbera in the absence of formal institutions to be an indicator of a performing post-war export sector. This study employs an institutional approach, informed by in-depth interviews and personal histories across a wide array of actors in the livestock export trade. Informal institutions have provided governance in the livestock export trade in the absence of formal institutions. However, coordination problems and other crippling challenges that have confronted livestock export since 1991 attest to the fact that informal institutions cannot be a substitute for formal institutions in the complex international trade. Somaliland had reinstated some formal institutions by the mid-1990s. However, the role of these institutions in the international livestock export trade is very limited due to their political status. Meanwhile, in the domestic economy, the interaction between formal and informal institutions has restructured the post-1991 livestock export trade.

Brokerage in the borderlands: the political economy of livestock intermediaries in northern Kenya

Journal of Eastern African Studies, 2020

This article argues that brokers are key actors in the cross-border livestock trade between Kenya and Somalia, where formal regulations are weak or absent. We elucidate the economic and social rationales for livestock brokerage as well as a series of brokering practices taking place at the intersection of profit making, kinship and trust. Besides producing social capital based on trust, brokers facilitate the formalization of livestock trading by linking livestock production sites in southern Somalia to consumer markets in Kenya. Brokers thereby take on various roles and functions that contribute to integrating markets across fragmented territories. Based on extended fieldwork conducted in and around Garissa livestock market as well as in Nairobi, the paper outlines the political economy of livestock intermediaries in the important Somali-Kenyan cross-border livestock trade.

The Transfer of Trust: Ethnicities as Economic Institutions in the Livestock Trade in West and East Africa

Africa, 2004

This article explores the role of ethnic identity in the framework of the livestock trade in West and East Africa. It argues that ethnic identity was used as an instrument to build trust relationships that were vital to the development of pre-colonial livestock trade networks.

Livestock trade and devolution in the Somali-Kenya transboundary corridor

Pastoralism, 2020

After the collapse of the central Somali state in 1991, Somali livestock trade has increasingly been re-oriented towards terminal markets in central and coastal Kenya, helped by the more recent trade liberalization in Kenya. The predominantly informal cross-border trade (ICBT) has nurtured local livelihoods and government revenues in Kenya, where informal transactions and formal regulation overlap in the Somali-fed livestock supply chains. This article analyses the practices and dynamics that characterize Somali-Kenyan cross-border livestock trade, and proceeds to point out important policy issues that have emerged after the devolution of key state functions and regulation to county governments. The article finally highlights areas of collaboration between the national and county governments that are necessary to achieve a credible supply of meat in Kenyan and international markets. By doing so, it explores the linkage between changes in the political economy of cross-border livesto...

Entrust we must: The role of 'trust' in Somali economic life

DIIS Working Paper, 2018

‘Trust’ is a concept that has received much attention in studies of informal economies which operate in large part outside of formal state regulation. Somali trade provides a pertinent case. In Somalia, across Somali East Africa and beyond, business has thrived, in spite of – or, some would argue, partially because of – the statelessness of the homeland. Beyond scholarly uses, ‘trust’ is also a concept used by Somalis themselves to explain their entrepreneurial success. This Working Paper asks what the concept of ‘trust’ reveals and conceals about Somali economic life, examining the concept in both its etic and emic uses. It does so drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Eastleigh, an estate in Nairobi’s Eastlands, whose economy is, in many ways, exemplarily ‘informal’, and driven by Somali enterprise and capital investments. We argue that while the concept of ‘trust’ can help explain the social relations underpinning trade, and in particular the provision of credit, trust is not a prerequisite for acts of trusting in business. Rather, acts of trusting can themselves work to produce trust, even though they do not eliminate deceit and mistrust in the estate. Trust in its emic usage emerges as a normative rather than descriptive discourse that creates a moral impetus for acts of trusting, even as ‘trusters’ may not necessarily fully trust those they do business with. In Eastleigh, an important driver of this discourse is the demand for credit, which itself plays a crucial role in driving the estate’s economy.

Revenues on the hoof: livestock trade, taxation and state-making in the Somali territories

Journal article , 2020

This article considers the relationship between livestock taxation and local state formation dynamics in the northern Somali territories. While the economic importance of livestock in Somalia is undisputed, its significance as a source of revenue and legitimacy for public administrations and competing statebuilding projects has been overlooked. Drawing on fieldwork in Somaliland's main livestock markets and the Berbera corridor, we highlight the interplay between public administrations that seek to maximize livestock revenue and traders who attempt to minimize taxation. State attempts to capture these 'revenues on the hoof' by both coercive and consensual means, shifting livestock trading routes and fluctuating animal trading volumes produce different taxation patterns across the Somali territories. As a result, fiscal contracts between livestock traders and public administrations are marked by various degrees of reciprocity and coercion.

A Rapid Appraisal of Institutions Supporting Somali Livestock Export

Formal or Informal, Legal or Illegal: The Ambiguous Nature of Cross-border Livestock Trade in the Horn of Africa

In this article, we address cross-border trade from the perspectives of state institutions and their agents, on the one hand, and private merchants and pastoralists, on the other. It will be shown that at times their agendas strongly conflict, but in other situations workable accommodations and policy interpretations are found even while acknowledging the illegality of the actions. Because of the extensive border zones in the Horn with few custom posts and banking facilities, the state often has no recourse but to turn a “blind eye” to cross-border trade. Throughout the paper, it is shown how vastly different border policies and international relationships among neighboring countries (i.e. Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia) in the region challenge generalizations about informality and cross-border trade. In the conclusion we assess recent attempts by government authorities to coerce the trade into formal channels, but with minimal success.

Deception and default in a global marketplace: the political economy of livestock export trade in Ethiopia

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2022

During 2014 to 2019, the export of cattle from Ethiopia, the African country with the largest cattle population, declined more than 95 percent after achieving impressive gains from 2001 to 2013. The cattle export trade depends almost solely on the pastoral lowlands, especially those of the Borana pastoralist in southern Ethiopia, and on an informal, exploitive credit system based on a complex system of deferred payments. The article asks: How did the deferred payment system for exported cattle from Ethiopia contribute to the collapse of the trade since 2014? It argues that this risky and regressive form of informal credit where debt is passed down the market chain to Borana traders and pastoralists helps to explain the export collapse. It is shown that unlike trade in other livestock species, this pattern of credit and payment defaults are especially associated with cattle export trade, which in turn is dependent on a pastoralist production system increasingly constrained by land enclosures and settlements. By examining how counter flows of capital, credit, and debt in the export market chain disadvantage pastoralist traders and producers, the article helps to explain how a once booming trade was undermined by its own contradictory processes and unequal relationships.

A rapid appraisal of institutions supporting Somali livestock export: improvement and diversification of Somali livestock trade and marketing project

2008