Sabine Planel

A view of a 'bureaucratic' developmental State: local governance and agricultural extension in rural Ethiopia

This article discusses the hybridism of the Ethiopian developmental state through an analysis of the local interface between the state and the peasantry. The aim is to explore to what extent bureaucratic rationality both conditions and perverts the procedures employed in the implementation of public rural development policies, in this case agricultural extension. And to what extent development policies can operate as an instrument of power that reinforces the local disempowerment of the most vulnerable peasants. The article makes a detailed analysis of the machinery of agricultural extension, the local conditions of distribution and reception of fertiliser and improved seeds in rural Ethiopia.

(Re)making politics in a new urban Ethiopia: an empirical reading of the right to the city in Addis Ababa’s condominiums

ABSTRACT This article analyses the Ethiopian transition, particularly its social and political dimension based on an urban situation. It contributes to the debate over the right to the city in a dynamic way by articulating the analytical fit between political experiments and city dwelling, which are apparent in an Ethiopian context in a triangle of political emancipation, urban relocation and access to private property. It focuses on the question of access to housing in a recent condominium development on the outskirts of Addis Ababa. The article uses a situated, qualitative and localist approach to analyse the social project of housing policies, and especially the drive to create an urban middle class. It breaks down the profiles and strategies of condominium dwellers and deconstructs the mechanical link between condominium and middle class. Finally, it addresses the capacity of citizens to produce a new social – and potentially a new political – order, or conversely, to reproduce the old socio-political order.