This chapter lays out the book’s contributions to the literatures on state-led development and authoritarian durability. The book provides a detailed examination of the case of Ethiopia in which the EPRDF regime sought to maintain power through rapid development and the structural transformation of the economy. In particular, rapid development was intended to create mass industrial employment in order to gradually replace access to land as the main tool for mass distribution, and thereby maintain political order. The failings of industrial policy amidst rapid population growth resulted in extreme shortages of land and employment for younger generations, an important factor fuelling the mass anti-government protests that eventually forced regime change. The Ethiopian case therefore suggests that the contemporary global economy and the delayed demographic transition present major challenges to state-led development; and that analyses of authoritarian durability need to consider the dynamic challenges of mass incorporation, as well as elite politics.

By the mid-2010s, distributive crisis – manifest in shortages of land and employment that particularly affected young adults – undermined the EPRDF’s political control. Despite engineering landslide electoral victories in 2010 and 2015, mass anti-government protests exploded in 2014 and then again from late 2015. By early 2018, the EPRDF conceded a leadership change that ultimately led to the abandonment of its project of state-led development and the collapse of the ruling coalition. This chapter provides a detailed account of these events, highlighting three main causes. First, the distributive crisis meant that many young adults had escaped the EPRDF’s control and were deeply disenchanted with unfulfilled promises of developmental progress. Second, the EPRDF’s response differed markedly from past crises due to divisions within the ruling elite. Rather than a collective threat requiring a coherent response, subordinate EPRDF factions sought to use the protests as political leverage within the ruling coalition. Third, these mass and elite political dynamics were refracted through the prism of ethnic federalism; mass unrest and elite contestation manifest along ethnic lines.

This final chapter reflects on the implications of the rise and fall of the EPRDF. The discussion considers, first, the EPRDF’s legacy for Ethiopian politics and development, and, second, the relevance of Ethiopia for debates about late-late development and authoritarian durability. While the beginning of the twenty-first century has seen resurgent interest in state-led development and industrial policy, there has been insufficient attention to the political economy drivers that might realise structural transformation in a context of late-late development. For many East Asian late developers, authoritarian leaders pursued development as a means of maintaining political order. While somewhat comparable processes underpinned rapid growth in Ethiopia, the EPRDF’s failings raise doubts regarding the potential for authoritarian state-led development in Africa. The realisation of hopes for structural transformation in Africa will require new political configurations that provide rulers with the incentives to pursue political survival through economic transformation within the constraints of late-late development.

Chapter 3 examines the formation of the Ethiopian state and the revolution of the 1970s. This analysis makes two contributions to understanding the EPRDF and its project of state-led development. The first is to show that long-run state formation and the revolution forged many features of the state that subsequently enabled the EPRDF’s development project, even if these state structures were not initially utilised for developmental purposes under the Derg. More problematically, however, state formation also resulted in a linguistically and culturally diverse population, which was increasingly politicised along ethnic lines. Second, the chapter emphasises the EPRDF’s revolutionary origins. The Emperor’s overthrow in 1974 resulted in competition between multiple revolutionary movements, including one that was overtaken by the military in urban areas and rural-based ethno-nationalist insurgencies that sought to fight their way to the centre. These revolutionary origins shaped the EPRDF’s strategy for gaining and maintaining power, and the structure of the party itself, as it transitioned from an ethno-nationalist movement to a national government.

Chapter 5 examines the EPRDF’s changing approach to agricultural development and the agrarian question. The EPRDF’s initial strategy was rooted in the TPLF’s focus on the peasant majority as its political base. The government sought to secure the acquiescence of the peasantry through the distribution of land, while agricultural inputs would raise agricultural productivity and generate a surplus that could finance industrial expansion, creating mass employment and alleviating pressure on rural land. The political crises of the early 2000s forced a re-evaluation of this agriculture-first approach, however. Faced with growing land shortages, the government sought to raise productivity at the cost of inequality and differentiation. The chapter examines, first, the government’s focus on high potential smallholders; and, second, the selective expropriation of peasant producers to make way for agricultural investments. While this strategy ultimately delivered rising agricultural productivity, a combination of population growth, displacement for investments and growing market forces eroded the main means of mass distribution and political control – access to land.

Chapter 4 focuses on the political dynamics that shaped the EPRDF’s development strategy from 1991 to the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in 2012. Despite military dominance, the EPRDF was vulnerable due to its lack of a political base outside Tigray. The new government sought to consolidate control of the ethnically diverse peasantry through a dual strategy: establishing federalism that provided for ethnic self-determination; and a broad-based development strategy to secure compliance through mass distribution. From early on, however, the government recognised that the main form of distribution – land access – would be undermined by population growth, necessitating industrialisation and mass employment creation to maintain mass acquiescence. During the early 2000s, the EPRDF leadership experienced a series of crises that resulted in increased elite cohesion and a shared sense of the threat facing the ruling elite. The result was Ethiopia’s ‘developmental state’ model, comprising infrastructure development, industrialisation and agricultural commercialisation to deliver the economic transformation required to meet the mass distributive challenge facing the regime.

Chapter 6 examines the EPRDF’s evolving attempts to generate mass manufacturing employment as a distributive strategy to replace the past focus on land and thereby retain political order. The government’s initial industrial strategy was inspired by post-war South Korea and Taiwan, seeking to nurture domestic capitalists to global competitiveness in a handful of labour-intensive sectors. However, this strategy largely failed due to the limited experience of domestic firms and state agencies, and intense competition in global markets. Consequently, the growing political imperative of mass employment creation and foreign exchange earnings prompted the government to change approach, building a series of industrial parks to attract foreign direct investment in an attempt to accelerate the industrialisation drive. Despite the high political priority placed on industrial development, however, progress in industrial employment creation was consistently slower than that demanded by the political leadership. Vitally, modest job creation was dwarfed by rapid population growth, leading to a growing distributive crisis of un- and underemployment, particularly affecting younger generations.

The EPRDF sought to delay urbanisation until it had delivered industrialisation as a means of preventing the political instability that it feared would accompany mass urban unemployment. However, faced with a growing urban population and urban political opposition in the early 2000s, the EPRDF brought urban areas to the centre of its development strategy. The ‘developmental state’ used control of finance and land to direct investment to industry, construction and infrastructure, much of which was located in urban centres. This chapter examines how the state’s efforts to accelerate structural transformation through urban development exacerbated the emerging distributive crisis resulting from the shortage of land and employment. Analysis focuses on case studies of Adama – one of the largest secondary cities – and the capital, Addis Ababa. State expropriation of peasants to make way for urban development exacerbated demographic factors that were already undermining land access. Urbanisation constituted a highly visible expression of the inequality of the ‘developmental state’, which, when overlaid on historically embedded ethnic divisions in Addis Ababa, proved an explosive combination.

Chapter 2 sets out the book’s theoretical approach. The first half argues that state-led development requires the formation of states with the capacity and autonomy required for effective intervention. However, it is only where state-led development aligns with elite threat perceptions that leaders make politically difficult choices to promote structural transformation. For many authoritarian regimes, it is when ruling elites face mass distributive pressures alongside resource constraints that they pursue development to expand the resources available to secure mass acquiescence. The second half of the chapter examines the specific challenges facing ‘late-late’ developing authoritarian regimes. First, the changing global economy, which is fragmented into global value chains with manufacturing driven by foreign investment, rather than domestic capitalists. Second, the delayed demographic transition that gives rise to large-scale population growth and urbanisation, enhancing mass distributive pressures. As such, regimes face severe distributive pressures at the same time as the state’s ability to address these is constrained by the global economy.

Chapter 8 examines the government’s ambiguous social protection response to the growing shortages of land and employment. The government’s initial development strategy aimed at broad-based growth that would obviate the need for programmes to address poverty and food insecurity. The increasingly acute shortage of land and employment, however, constituted a growing distributive crisis during the 2000s. The government did adopt social protection programmes in an attempt to address this distributive threat. However, resource constraints and the government’s ideological resistance to state handouts meant that this response was highly ambiguous. The result was that the government saw social protection as little more than a sticking plaster, temporarily supporting the most vulnerable while buying time for implementation of the national development strategy. Consequently, social protection did little to address the growing distributive problems highlighted in previous chapters.

Chapter 9 takes a closer look at how the party-state maintained control through village level case studies in Tigray – where the EPRDF’s hegemonic development project came closest to realisation – and Oromiya – where EPRDF control was most contested. The EPRDF utilised a combination of symbolic, distributive and coercive powers channelled through an increasingly elaborate and extensive party-state infrastructure to secure mass acquiescence. In particular, the chapter highlights that the party-state established control over the distribution of almost every necessary livelihood resource – including land, agricultural inputs, credit and social protection – effectively routing the survival strategies of the population through party-state structures. However, the distributive failings outlined in previous chapters – notably the shortage of land and employment – also exposed the limits of political control. The party-state had increasingly little to offer in terms of livelihoods for young adults, with the result that younger generations tended to have much weaker ties to the regime and increasingly escaped this strategy of enmeshment.