ABSTRACT
Ethiopian industrialisation history shows that the country has been in search of a workable industrial policy under different political regimes since the early 20th century. Yet this search remains unfinished. The main purpose of this chapter is to explore this unfinished search for alternatives influenced by the contemporary local and global contexts under which the policies are crafted and implemented. Despite the successive iterations of industrial policy, the share of the industrial sector is still low in the country’s GDP, which calls for exploring why industrialisation could not bring a lasting structural transformation in the country’s economic development. Ethiopia has now sought to indigenise the overall policy discourses through the new homegrown economic reform. The chapter critically discusses the current practices of developing Industrial Parks for realising public–private engagements in the country’s economic transformation through industrialisation. The analysis that follows explores the complex interplay between public and private actors that these programmes entail and thus sheds light on this volume’s overarching goal of unpacking public and private relations in an Ethiopian context.
