Political Decentralization and Governance in Hargaisa Local Government, Somaliland

This research aimed to reveal, through practical observation, the extent to which political decentralization can be considered a factor contributing to transparent governance in the local government of Hargaisa, Somaliland. The authors adopted the convergent parallel mixed-methods design in which data from 269 officials constituted the quantitative part, while 35 in-depth interviews supplied the qualitative part. The first major statistical analysis, namely Pearson correlation analysis, revealed a very strong, albeit imperfect, positive relationship between political decentralization and transparency (r = 0.259, p = 0.000), thereby rejecting the null hypothesis. The correlation was, however, weak to moderate. The second analysis through simple linear regression concluded that fiscal decentralization was a significant predictor of transparency (p = 0.001), but current that it explained only 6.3% of its variance (Adjusted R² = 0.063). Descriptive statistics also pointed to a gap between the declared and actual transparency; not only did a high overall perception of transparency get reflected in the mean score of 2.88, but also an extremely low score of 2.49 indicated that the public access to information was the critical area. Qualitative data made it clear that the implementation gap was mainly due to powerful informal institutions that were keeping formal decentralization reforms apart from practice. Political decentralization was viewed as a factor contributing to but not sufficient for transparency in Hargaisa by the study, where its impact was strongly controlled by informal power structures and poor fiscal autonomy.