Oman is officially home to 216 tribes – all of them registered with the government. Certification of tribal membership is a prerequisite for Omanis seeking to obtain a license, passport or other official document. In 2006, the government replaced the al-Tuwaiya and al-Khalifain tribal designations with that of the larger and more powerful al-Harthi tribe. In response, the tribes complained to Oman's administrative courts and several human rights organisations. Oman's government verbally agreed to cease this designation. However, tribe members attest that it has continued. Despite the kinship authority these tribes carry, the government's bureaucratic authority retains the ability to determine which tribes are real in the eyes of the state. Kinship authority in Oman has been instrumentalised by the state's bureaucracy in ways that make it fundamentally different from Kuwait. Functions of kinship authority often serve bureaucratic ends rather than the other way around. As such, kinship authority in the Sultanate has instrumentalised salience.

Oman's cooperative access to vital limited resources created different pathdependent conditions to those in Kuwait, and pre-state conditions are a better explanation of these differences than state capacity. While some kinship groups in Oman were nomadic, many settled in and around towns and villages where they cooperated over access to water. To facilitate this access, these kinship groups formed proto-bureaucracies that had authority over individuals, including leaders of kinship hierarchies. During state building, Oman's government subsumed these proto-bureaucracies within the state's bureaucratic apparatus. Oman began this process by improving infrastructure in non-urban areas of the city, and extending national water and electricity networks to these locations. This process diminished the political salience of kinship authority in Oman by making the government the major provider of resources. Second, the government used this infrastructure to connect local proto-bureaucratic authority with the bureaucratic authority of the state. It used existing buy-in from the population to proto-bureaucratic governance to build assent to bureaucratic authority. By reframing tribal leaders as state officials, Oman's government embedded kinship authority within the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. Finally, Oman used nationalism to enhance loyalty to the state and its leader. Downplaying differences resulting from kinship identity, this nationalism took on a more territorial idiom than it had in Kuwait. The government built up nationalism through the construction of common national symbols across the geographic expanse it governed. The outcome of this state-building process is that kinship authority has instrumentalised political salience in Oman.