ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses what is arguably the Nile’s ever biggest hydraulic project. It examines the work by scholars who explored how the Ethiopian government mobilizes its ‘developmental state’ model to reinforce state power under the guises of democracy and technical packages of development. The chapter explores the morphodynamics of drainage and soil conservation so as to provide a material reading of popular mobilization programmes that make Ethiopia’s ‘developmental state’. Such a political morphology approach brings into view two elements often absent in political accounts of environmental transformation. First, it recognises how the people of Michael engage in the transformation of the landscape and in the shaping of categories through which this landscape is known by government officials. Second, the power of the ‘developmental state’ model derives from the exploitation of the increasing social and physical tensions on the hill by a new coalition between landholders and government officials.
