‘Producing’ institutions of climate change adaptation and food security in north eastern Ethiopia

Highlights

•	Institutions play an important role in adaptation and food security action coordination.
•	State actors could use institutions to contain the resource management.
•	Institutions need to be seen as dynamic and socially produced.
•	Institutional diagnostics needs to capture social processes that produce institutions.

Abstract

The paper presents institutional diagnostics, which is sensitive to dynamic social and political processes ‘producing’ institutions underlying practices in resource management, climate change adaptation, and food security. The paper is based on a qualitative case study on watershed development interventions conducted in two villages in Amhara Region, Ethiopia. The research showed that resource management, adaptation, and food security institutions in Ethiopia are a result of struggles between containment strategies of the Ethiopian state and counter containment strategies of local communities. While the state’s containment institutions allowed it to mobilize a large number of rural residents for its resource management interventions, the counter containment strategies from local communities limited the potential contribution of the interventions for adaptation and food security endeavors of the state. From an institutional diagnostic perspective two conclusions are made, one empirical and another theoretical. The empirical part of the paper concludes that the Ethiopian state is using institutions to contain its population towards state-driven development pathways, which is essential to understand watershed development and state-led natural resource management interventions. The theoretical portion concludes that although institutions are often portrayed as static elements of social life, in fact they are also dynamic, socially produced, and could be coopted by powerful actors.

Keywords:

• Institutions
• Diagnostics
• Food security
• Adaptation
• Resource management
• Power relations

Acknowledgements

This paper is extracted from my PhD dissertation and modified to suite the special issue. The funding for my PhD study came from the German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD) and Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS). I would like to thank Professor Detlef Mueller-Mahn for his constructive guidance during the PhD study. I also would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive reviews and Frehiwot Tilahun for her assistance in proof reading the paper.

Notes

1 ‘Development’ is referred as ‘a normative process of becoming, a movement from poverty to wellbeing (Duffield, 1994). Developmentalism refers to a technologically modern policy choice that countries in the South take to catch up with countries in the North (Wallerstein, 2005). Developmental state on the other hard refers to ‘a coalition consisting of politicians and state bureaucrats that prioritizes economic growth ‘over all else” (Pereira, 2008: 1190). In Ethiopian case, the ‘developmental state’ ideology of the governing party EPRDF refers to the party-state with the exclusive responsibility of setting economic development priorities for the country (Bach, 2011).

2 Quotations are translated from Amharic to English by the author.