ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the conceptualisation, place and role of the private sector in Ethiopia’s enduring tradition of state developmentalism, tracing its evolution across imperial, socialist (Derg) and federalist (Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front/Prosperity Party) regimes. Despite ideological shifts, from monarchy to socialism to developmental state and ethnic federalism, Ethiopian development discourse has consistently privileged the state as the primary agent of development, marginalising both popular forces and private enterprise. The recent adoption of PPPs marks a new, though ambivalent, invitation to the private sector as a development actor. Through genealogical exploration focusing on legal, institutional and conceptual sites, this study reveals how the ‘private’ has been structurally alien to Ethiopia’s political economy, caught between statist hegemony and popular resistance. Drawing on historical policy documents and secondary literature, the chapter argues that Ethiopia’s unresolved tension between centralised developmentalism and pluralist society, manifest in contested property relations and exclusionary governance, has stifled the private sector’s development. The PPP framework, while ostensibly liberalising and mobilising the private in a new fashion, perpetuates state dominance, illustrating continuity in Ethiopia’s development dilemma as the state negotiates global capitalist integration.
