Yemen's second political opening differed from either the first or the third., for the action shifted from national to community politics. The context for this opening was the tenuous rule of an unstable North Yemeni republican state over a society undergoing a profound socioeconomic transformation fueled by infusions of foreign capital in the form of remittances and foreign aid. Under these circumstances, and with ample resort to folk mechanisms, ad hoc road, school, and utilities projects transformed everyday material life, enhanced the power of the state, and delivered the global market to rural North Yemen. The structural-functional NGO model, as foreign development experts learned, fitted badly, but the impressive project record showed that formal modern organization was not a prerequisite for getting important things done. Furthermore, while legislation and financial allocations certainly influenced the organization of civil society, LDAs not only negotiated with the center from a position of strength but collectively affected the structure of the government as well. The case study of self-help also shows the importance of basic services as the material basis for state hegemony, underscoring how the imposition of legal–rational accounting methods is part of that process. As far as I know, nothing like it has been documented elsewhere in the Arab world.

The various perspectives on Arab civil society identified in the introductory chapter each shed some insight into the phenomenon known in English as LDAs and in Arabic as ta'āwun al-ahlī. In comparative cross-national perspective the Yemeni LDAs seemed a remarkable instance of local self-help, although the popular dimension of cooperation also infused its practice with folk idioms cultural essentialists often dismissed as inherently reactionary.