ABSTRACT
Ascending to power after a seventeen-year civil war, the new regime faced daunting challenges. The two most important were the need to assert its control throughout the country and to build its legitimacy by delivering development. It seemed as if everything needed fixing at once; on top of that, the government faced a difficult domestic and international environment. In 1994, John Cohen, a fellow with the Harvard Institute of International Development and a leading scholar of Ethiopia, and colleagues conducted an assessment of the challenges confronting the new government, which he enumerated as follows:
• Steady proliferation of demands that threaten to overload the capacity of the government leadership and [to] induce a “crisis management” style of decision-making, marked by institutional drift, confusion, and rising frustration. This is only exacerbated by the institutional gap that exists in government, due to the continued estrangement between the government and inherited ministries.
