Paper short abstract:

The Ethiopian Climate Resilient Green Economy document, and its strategies of visual mapping of sectors, emissions and timelines, are analysed as an instance of High Modernism: the totalising but also depoliticising “aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society”.

Paper long abstract:

The Ethiopian Governments' vision in its Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) document, to "achieve middle-income status by 2025 in a climate-resilient green economy" while limiting 2030 emissions to around today's level, has attracted favourable attention from donors and commentators on green growth. The plan to do this is based on four pillars - crops and livestock, forests, energy, transport - and 60 "initiatives" or "levers" that are cost-effective in terms of $/tonne emission avoided.

Besides untransparent analyses and costings, programme recommendations at an extreme level of generality, and an absence of engagement with well-known analyses of the Ethiopian livestock sector, especially but not solely the pastoral sub-sector, the document uses a dehumanized language where livestock keepers are undifferentiated and have no agency. The CRGE thus evokes Scott's (1998) idea of High Modernism: "the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society… raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level". The paper explores the CRGE's emphasis on visual mapping of sectors, emissions, "levers", costs and timelines, as a contemporary transformation of the emphasis on geographical mapping in Scott's conception of High Modernism, as well as the tendency to "devalue or banish politics".

The paper provides a critique, based on close textual analysis, of the CRGE document and its livestock appendix to present a note of caution about GE processes becoming technocratic and ungrounded in the reality of citizens: "high-modernist designs for life and production tend to diminish the skills, agility, initiative and morale of the intended beneficiaries."