The Politics of Urban Industrialization: Integrating the Urban Industrial Nexus in Ethiopia's Disintegrating Party State

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Through this fellowship, I aim to consolidate my PhD research and make it available to academics, policy makers and practitioners. The fellowship will provide me with the space and resources to conduct knowledge exchange activities with key policy makers through strategic one-on-one meetings and with targeted practitioner audiences through a knowledge exchange workshop. I will reach academic audiences through academic journal papers, and developing a proposal for a book that will present the complete argument of my PhD. I will also start the work of expanding the scope of my research by undertaking limited new exploratory research on recent developments in the politics of urbanization in Ethiopia. Finally, The fellowship will also contribute to my development as an independent researcher by allowing me to access advanced skills and methods training, mentorship for developing a Leverhulme PDF proposal and various opportunities to build networks in my field. My PhD research examined the problem of urban-industrial policy fragmentation in a leading example of rapid industrial transformation in East Africa, Ethiopia. Through a grounded study of urban industrial policy making and planning, the research found planning failures to be the result of the shifting political dynamics within the ruling party. The gradual breakdown of the core integrative institutions of the party state, the party bureaucracy and the ethnic federation, are at the heart of the integration challenge. The infrastructural and housing challenges that emerged as a result of this dissociated planning have been partially resolved, but the emerging Ethiopian urban-industrial nexus as a whole remains undefined and unaccounted for by the plethora of isolated streams of development planning and intervention, indicating continued implications for Ethiopia's industrialization and urbanization in years ahead. More broadly, Africa's ongoing radical transformation in the 21st century is characterized by these two these mega processes of change: its urban and industrial transitions. Industrialization is currently one of the top policy agendas for a number of sub-Saharan African countries. These countries are pursuing rapid state-led export-oriented industrialization in cities following the 2008 African Union Summit that endorsed the African Union's Action Plan for the Accelerated Industrial Development of Africa (AU, 2011). Sub-Saharan African countries, and particularly East African countries, are at the same time experiencing some of the highest urbanization rates in the world. While a growing body of scholarship has demonstrated that Africa's accelerated industrialization has wide reaching consequences for urbanization and vice versa, these two processes of change are being steered through highly fragmented state action that emanates from factional party politics in many of these countries. The findings of my research therefore offer valuable insights to the study of the politics of urban industrialization in a broader range of developmental authoritarian African states, a field that is virtually unexplored to date. Political developments in those contexts were critical to the relative success of urban and industrial policy or their failure. However, recent scholarship that has engaged the urban dimension of Industrial Parks in Africa has not engaged the political drivers of policy fragmentation (Lawanson and Agunbiade, 2018; G/Egziabher & Yemeru, 2020; Cheru and Fikreselassie, 2020). At the same time, scholarship on the politics of industrialication, more generally, has tended to overlook the urban dimension of development politics in its explanations of the successes and failures of economic development planning (Whitfield et. Al., 2015, Chitonge and Lawrence, 2020). My PhD research and my current research looking at the politics of structural transformation in Ethiopian cities to address these gaps.