Fishery Cooperatives as Institutional Intermediaries in Fragile Contexts: Assessing Social-Ecological Resilience in South-Central Somalia

Small-scale fisheries provide essential coastal livelihoods in developing regions, yet they often confront severe institutional voids within fragile-state contexts. Adopting a social-ecological systems framework, this study addresses three sequential objectives: characterizing the contemporary institutional and demographic status of fishery cooperatives across the five South-Central Federal Member States in comparison to their late-1980s historical peak; ranking the socio-economic, infrastructural, regulatory, and environmental impediments to cooperative efficacy; and evaluating the contributions of these cooperatives to sustainable fisheries development. This investigation analyzes how fishery cooperatives act as institutional intermediaries to bolster economic resilience within the Somali coastal economy—a sector central to the National Transformation Plan, despite persistent regulatory fragmentation. Through semi-structured qualitative interviews with key informants—analyzed via reflexive thematic analysis and chi-square testing of age-cohort structure—the study finds that illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing and inadequate post-harvest infrastructure are the principal constraints, whereas training, education, and community collaboration constitute the primary contributions. The results characterize these cooperatives as hybrid institutions that compensate for limited central-state capacity in remote coastal settlements while serving as intermediaries for the Federal Ministry of Fisheries and Blue Economy where co-management mandates are implemented. By extending the actor-community dimension of the SES framework to include age-cohort structure, this research demonstrates that clan-based reciprocal arrangements can serve as functional substitutes for Ostrom’s first design principle in contexts of persistent fragility. The study recommends multi-stakeholder partnerships to advance targeted capacity-building, financial literacy, and technological integration, and suggests future research into the post-harvest and retail sectors to examine the role of women in the Somali blue economy.