WDM Editorial

A Somali voice in a global journal

GAROWE, Puntland, Somalia — The email from the editors of Environmental Policy and Governance arrived in October 2026. Ismail H. Warsame’s manuscript, “Environmental Governance and the Vocational Skills Deficit in Fragile States: A Comparative Policy Review of Somalia, Yemen and Liberia,” had been accepted. The journal is published by Wiley and edited by Andy Gouldson, and it has a long record of printing serious work on how societies look after their environments. Getting in is hard.

We think this acceptance is worth more than a line in a publication list. Most research on fragile states is still produced by people who study them from a distance. Warsame lives and works in Garowe. His article takes an argument formed here, in Puntland, and puts it in front of the people who shape environmental policy research worldwide.

The question he asks is one the field usually skips. A ministry drafts an environmental policy. A government adopts it. Then who goes out and does the work?

Policy without hands

His answer is that fragile states are not mainly short of rules. They tend to have plenty of laws, national strategies and donor frameworks. What they don’t have is enough trained people to enforce the rules, keep watch over forests, pastures and fishing grounds, repair the damage and earn a decent living from the land and sea without wrecking it.

The article started as a study of Somalia alone. That study followed four kinds of damage: plastic pollution, illegal fishing, worn-out rangelands and frankincense trees tapped beyond what they can bear. Warsame traced each one back to the same weak spot, the country’s technical and vocational education and training (TVET) system.

Put plainly, if there are no fisheries officers, no one patrols the coast. If there are no extension workers, damaged rangeland doesn’t recover. Untrained harvesters overtap frankincense trees, and without technicians, rubbish piles up. The gap in skills becomes a gap in protection, and the damage moves into it.

Three countries, one pattern

Was this a Somali problem, or something bigger? To find out, Warsame added Yemen and Liberia to the study. At first glance the three have little in common. They are in different regions, they have different histories and their crises are at different stages.

Somalia has lived through decades of state collapse, has a long coastline and depends on pastoral economies that are under heavy strain. Yemen is torn apart by a war that has not ended, and its fishing communities and already scarce water are both at risk. Liberia is about two decades past its civil wars and still rebuilding, with its forests and mineral wealth on the line.

That is why the comparison works. If the same shortage of skilled people shows up in all three places, it is hard to call it a local quirk. It looks more like part of what fragility is. It also gives readers well beyond Somali studies a reason to pay attention.

What the article adds

Two groups of researchers rarely read each other’s work. Environmental governance scholars write about institutions, regulations and money. Education and labor scholars write about jobs, employability and growth. Warsame brings the two together. In his account, vocational skills are part of the governance system itself, as necessary to making environmental policy work as any law or budget.

This has practical consequences. Aid programs that pay for strategies and plans but not for the people to carry them out will keep falling short where policy meets the ground. And vocational training could be built around environmental goals, instead of being treated only as a way to create jobs.

For fragile states, there is good news in this. Building skills does not have to wait for a strong central government. Regional administrations, universities and communities can start now, even while national politics remains unsettled.

Earned through review

The article did not reach its final form easily. It began as a single-country study, “Environmental Degradation and the Vocational Skills Deficit in Somalia.”

For Environmental Policy and Governance, Warsame widened it to three countries. In October 2026 the journal sent back a major-revisions decision and asked that the piece be considered as a review article. He rewrote it along those lines, and the revised version was accepted later that month under a new title that reflects its comparative and policy focus.

He had until January 2027 to submit the revision. He met the reviewers’ demands nearly three months early, which speaks to how solid the research was and how well he knew his material.

Why it matters for Somalia and Puntland

For Somali readers, and for the partners who work with Somali institutions, none of this is abstract. Puntland’s frankincense groves, fishing grounds and rangelands are part of the Somali case, and each one needs people trained to look after it.

Warsame knows this from experience, not only from research. He was Puntland’s first chief of Cabinet, from 1998 to 2004. He later worked with the joint U.N. and World Bank Secretariat on Somalia’s Reconstruction and Development Programme, then coordinated aid for the Transitional Federal Government with the European Union. In those years he saw firsthand how plans written in capitals and donor offices ran up against what local institutions could actually do.

So the article comes from someone who has been in the rooms where aid priorities are set. He has now checked what he saw there against evidence from three fragile states.

Conclusion

This acceptance is a real contribution to the field. The article puts vocational skills on the agenda of environmental governance research. It shows that Somalia, Yemen and Liberia share the same problem. And it brings a Horn of Africa scholar who has also worked as a practitioner into a conversation that too often talks about fragile states rather than with them.

The article is now in production at Wiley. Its message should hold long after the current round of policy debates: environmental protection in fragile states will work only when the people responsible for it have been trained to do the job.