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Knowledge, power and politics: the environmental
policy-making process in Ethiopia
This article casts light on how policy decisions are made in Ethiopia.
It reveals a complex environment in which policy debates are not
resolved as a result of rational choices but are often fudged as
conflicts rage among ever-shifting networks of scientists, donors,
ideologues and bureaucrats. The study traces controversies characterising
the evolution of rural development policies. Those clinging to the
original Maoist inspiration of the ruling party argue that mass-mobilisation
schemes can combat the long-term challenge of soil erosion. Others
promote policies to increase incentives for farmers to invest in
their own land. Some look to off-the-shelf modern Green Revolution
technologies to avert the recurrent food crises, while others argue
for low external input solutions based on the principles of conservation
agriculture.
The study looks at the types of knowledge about natural resources
from which policy conflicts emerge and how positions get established,
challenged and excluded. Seemingly regardless of the regime in power,
agricultural extension policies in Ethiopia have offered more of
the same: external inputs (seeds and fertiliser) linked to credit
programmes and mass mobilisation to check erosion. The SG-2000 programme,
launched in 1995 with support from the World Bank and international
scientists, chimed with a huge, ultimately unsuccessful, World Food
Programme food-for work scheme to build bunds and plant seedlings.
In a political climate dominated by a government staking its credibility
on achieving food security, little space remained available for
different views on agricultural extension.
Ethiopia today, like past regimes, tends to authoritarianism, hierarchy,
centralised rule and lack of transparency. However, despite a political
culture inheriting a bureaucratic mind-set antithetical to bottom-up
policies, debate goes on. More recently alternative types of policy
process -participatory and inclusive- have begun to emerge. The
paper concludes by suggesting why these are happening in some parts
of Ethiopia but not others.
Other key features highlighted are:
- The surprising commonality between policies of Green Revolution
and environmental rehabilitation enthusiasts, united by a misplaced
belief in over-population and impending chaos.
- Ideas of environmental degradation, which are central to policy
narratives in Ethiopia, need to be examined much more critically
than is often the case.
- Significant differences, as regionalisation policies come on
stream, between Tigray (where participatory approaches belatedly
find an audience) and elsewhere where (much resented) top-down
orthodoxy prevails.
- When actor networks are tightly formed and impenetrable, no
amount of rational argument will budge a policy from its pedestal.
The findings suggest that external actors and policy makers should:
- recognise that funding of successful NGO participatory projects,
together with the imaginative creation of networks around these
activities can create new policy spaces, and help reshape official
thinking
- seize opportunities presented by decentralisation to promote
effective and appropriate local interventions.
[Summary taken from id21]
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