Collective action at the margins of the state: Institutional braiding and the micro-politics of development in Solomon Islands

This article examines how collective action for local public goods is forged, sustained, and sometimes unravels in hybrid governance settings, drawing on four comparative case studies from Solomon Islands. In remote and marginalised communities, infrastructure and services - such as roads, water systems, and agricultural projects - are not always state-delivered but often locally assembled. These efforts unfold within fragmented governance landscapes where authority is claimed simultaneously by state, customary, and religious institutions. Grounded in locally led fieldwork and Indigenous epistemologies, we trace how four village-level initiatives navigate this hybrid landscape to secure tangible, if uneven, improvements in everyday life. Using Ostrom's design principles as adaptable heuristics, we show how participation can be mobilised through shared imaginaries of pride, hardship, worship, and care as much as by material incentive; rule-making can depend less on procedural inclusion than on rendering obligations socially legitimate; monitoring can work through social visibility and accountability rather than formal oversight; and conflict resolution can centre less on adjudication than on preserving cooperation. Collective action is made possible through the active interweaving of socially recognised repertoires of authority, obligation, and meaning across church, kastom, and state domains. We conceptualise this process as institutional braiding: the micropolitical work of translation, role alignment, and relational repair through which plural authority becomes workable and cooperation becomes intelligible, legitimate, and binding. These findings advance political geography by spatialising collective action in marginalised settings and foregrounding the relational labour through which hybridity is mobilised in pursuit of developmental goals.