Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how state governance and development apparatus/practices evolved and consolidated out of the mobilization and deployment of vectors and forces of Somali clanship in the implementation of community-based social protection programme in the Somali pastoral peripheries.

Paper long abstract:

Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is a “transformative” social protection programme that couples food security with social security. Underpinning PSNP’s “transformative” role is its community-based approach, focusing upon the institutions and values of community to be participatory and responsive to the realities and interests of local communities. PSNP uses community-based targeting and public work activities. These roles, in the nomadic Somali pastoral context, are played by clanship (clan leadersship and/or institutions). However, based on ethnographic fieldwork in three pastoral villages of Ethiopia’s Somali region, this paper, shows how the mobilization and (re)deployment of the vectors and forces of clanship – for the implementation of PSNP – paradoxically opened up spaces for the expansion of conventional state governance and development apparatuses to the Somali peripheries based on the logic of a sedentary order-of-things. Clan leaders – in implementing PSNP – unwittingly, (re)organize their clan governance system in the way it supports the expansion of state bureaucratic power and institutionalization of state governance and development practices. Hence, clanship-based PSNP implementation has become an “effective” technology of extending state power to pastoral peripheries, and of shaping the lifestyles, settlement and livelihood of pastoralists. Instead of being an autonomous way of implementing PSNP, clanship has become a “new effective” mechanism of state control at a distance, that we call ‘government through clanship’.