Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net programme facilitates administrative decentralization and enhances state infrastructural power while intensifying/reconstituting state-society relations and enhancing (developmental) state-building in Ethiopia’s Somali pastoral periphery

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the analysis of fieldwork data on the implementation of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia’s Somali region, in this paper we argue that social protection programmes facilitate administrative decentralization, enhance state infrastructural power and reconfigure state-society relations in the peripheries. As the largest donor-funded social protection programme, while managed and implemented by the Ethiopian developmental state, PSNP has been launched since 2005 reaching an estimated 10 million beneficiaries. The (sub-)kebele – the most local, decentralized state institution – has become a key administrative structure for the implementation of PSNP locally. However, (sub-)kebele administrations were not functional, if they were established at all, in the Somali pastoral periphery so that initially PSNP was implemented through clans. However, our paper shows that the implementation of PSNP, gradually, enables the establishment and/or consolidation of (sub-)kebele administrations in the Somali periphery by remobilizing PSNP fiscal resources, informally/unofficially, as key sources of financing (sub-)kebele administrations and incentivizing officials; raising competition, among different clan lineages, for political representation within (sub-)kebele administrations as political power in the (sub-)kebele is directly translated into better access to PSNP (and other state) resources; expanding infrastructure that enhances territorial reach of the state; and (re)using PSNP documentations, such as client cards as administrative documents and/or informational apparatus in making Somali nomadic pastoralists, on the one hand, visible/legible and governable subjects, and as ways of political and technical recognition of Somali pastoralists, with citizenship rights, for the (re) distribution of social transfers even beyond PSNP on the other hand. Finally, we argue that all such (unintentional) practices and effects, accompanied by diverse subtle practices, enhance state-building and create a new social contract in the periphery by intensifying/reconstituting state-society relations beyond kinship-based network and identities.