Entrevista realizada al personal administrativo de la Sociedad Casa Brito

The thesis has nine chapters apart from the Introduction and the Conclusion. These chapters fall under four parts: examination of analytical perspectives on land (Chapter 1), historical contextualization of land tenure reforms in Ethiopia (Chapters 2 and 3), the existence of, reasons for, devices and features of land alienation (Chapters 4 to 8) and role of international institutions in Ethiopia`s land tenure reform (Chapter 9).

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One of the challenges the researcher faced during focus group discussions was that hierarchical thinking emanating from the Sidama culture tended to lead older informants to dominate the views of the younger ones, the latter tending to subscribe to the views of the former. This was attempted to be remedied by doing the focus group discussions separately for the two age groups. This reminds one George Meszaroes`s argument about the

pervasive nature of power relations in fieldwork: ‘‘power relations ... pervade the field and thereby define key

aspects of the researcher`s relationship to it, and vice versa.’’ See George Meszaroes (2007), ‘‘Researching the

Landless Movement in Brazil.’’ In Research Methods for Law, Mike, McConville and Wing Hong Chui (eds.) (Edinburgh University Press), p. 133.

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See Keith Punch (1998), Introduction to Social Research: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches (London, SAGE Publications) p.193 and Jenny Cameron (2003), ‘‘Focusing on the Focus Group’’, in Iain (ed.), Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography (Oxford, Oxford University Press) p.83.

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Chapter 1 extends the discussion in the Introduction about the land question by further elaborating the nature of the land question in today`s Ethiopia on the basis of critical analyses of main discourses on land reform in the country. The thread that runs through the Chapter is the need to transcend current land reform scholarship which is rather fixated on the State`s bureaucratic land control and land privatization. Chapters 4 to 8 identify and discuss an emerging post-2000 trend for state-led mechanisms of land alienation centered on economic growth as concretized in regulated land use rights transfers (Chapter 4), lax rural land expropriation regime (Chapter 5), kontract (Chapter 6), lack of legal recognition of communal rural lands and their consideration as sites for raising capital (Chapter 7) and large-scale land grants (Chapter 8).

Chapters 2 and 3 show that the current gravitation towards land alienation is rooted in the nation`s past. During the greater part of the Imperial period, as considered in Chapter 2, there had been land concentration in the hands of landlords and members of the royal family but poor rural producers were given possession over land they had worked on conditions of continued forcible fruit and personal labor extractions. Yet, actual and significant land dispossessions came to occur in the dying hours of the regime in favor of domestic and foreign investors including the state when a semi-capitalist component was grafted on the dominant feudal foundation.

Chapter 3 indicates that the patent signs of smallholder and pastoralist dispossession were averted upon the eruption of the revolution in 1974 when the Derg introduced redistributive land reform (abolishing feudal extractive measures) under ‘land to the tiller’ motto. The gains of such redistributive measures, however, were put into reverse gear when shortly after the land reform the Derg`s programme of socialist agriculture re-introduced extractive measures coupled with land dispossessions in favor of cooperatives and state farms.

Chapter 4 considers two contrasting tendencies; namely, that which inclines to equity expressed in the land for all ethos, on the one hand, and the one which is embodied in land law which suggests a process of state-controlled land commercialization, on the other. It explains the conception of land rights behind the land for all ethos which arises out of the Constitution, i.e., land as a socially embedded as opposed to mere commercial object. Chapter 5 examines a loose expropriation regime that is put in place in a way that assists transfer of land from small farmers and herders to developers. Chapter 6 reveals informal land deals encapsulated in the practice of kontract which begins as a voluntary private transaction but gets the facilitation and blessing of government bureaucracy in the process of transferring land use rights to improvers in a manner

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contrary to the underlying tenets of land law and policy of the State. These chapters especially Chapter 4 highlights the lack of proper form of constitutionality, be it judicial or otherwise, to restrain the actions of the State concerning land.

While Chapters 4 to 6 show the state`s endeavor to induce capital accumulation through the transfer of privately held land to improvers, the next two chapters (Chapters 7 and 8) examine the weak legal basis of as well as transfer of communal rural lands that historically and customarily belong to peasants and pastoralists to capital via the deployment of the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ ‘empty land’ and ‘underutilized land’ discourses both in lowland and highland Ethiopia.

Chapters 4 to 8 in common characterize the land alienation tendency as state-driven, growth-centered, property rights-based, centralized land transfers and contested. The last chapter provides an account of the resolution of the land question of the country by global institutions chiefly the WB and the USAID. These two institutions prescribe one or another form of land privatization as antidote for Ethiopia.

The overall conclusions of the thesis are as follows. There is a patent sign of Ethiopia`s shift from a non-marketable land possession reflected in the ‘people`s ownership of land’ to a marketable property in land underway with government control of the process. This tendency to dis-embed land under the controlling hand of the state has produced tension between the avowed official rhetoric of equity-centered land law and policy, and land commercialization to promote economic growth by transferring land to ‘efficient land users’ with its accompanying creation of competing constituencies. The tilt has resulted in another tension over land matters between federal and regional governments where the center claims that efficiency demands that it handle land transfers to developers whereas the peripheries assert their constitutional right to self- government. Likewise, the global institutions have run into a contradiction because they prescribe for land right to the poor as a strategy to reduce poverty in Ethiopia and at the same time they encourage large-scale land grants under the fashionable idea of ‘responsible agricultural investment.’