Paper short abstract:

This paper questions the assumed static nature of Ethiopian land tenure since the 1975 nationalisation. Changing development strategies and growing regional autonomy have driven land tenure evolution, new responses to the agrarian question of labour and re-imagining of an agrarian future.

Paper long abstract:

The literature on Ethiopian land tenure frequently presents land law as static since the 1975 land-to-the-tiller reform. While state ownership established at that time has been retained, this continuity masks important changes to the land tenure regime and, in particular, the proposed resolution of the agrarian question embedded within changing national development strategies. This paper is based on ten years of research on land tenure in Ethiopia involving dozens of key informant interviews with politicians, bureaucrats and donors involved in the sector, as well as detailed analysis of land laws. The paper demonstrates that changing development strategies over 30 years of rule by the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front from Albanian socialism to an East Asian-style developmental state to market-led development have vital implications for land tenure and the government's intended response to the agrarian question. Specifically, the last 30 years have seen an end to regular land redistributions, registration of landholding rights, liberalisation of rental markets and, most recently, permission to mortgage land. These legal changes are part of a changing response to the agrarian question of labour, from an attempt to absorb labour into smallholder agriculture to actively promoting the exit of surplus labour from the agricultural sector to an uncertain future in the context of high rates of unemployment. Furthermore, the federal system and growing regional autonomy has introduced a new dynamic whereby regional administrations, rather than the federal government, have led reforms, reinterpreting what is meant by state ownership and re-imagining an agrarian future in Ethiopia.