Paper short abstract:

The paper investigates the relation between water, land and labour redistribution and state formation in a large scale irrigation investment in western Ethiopian lowlands, combing ethongrpahic visual research with remote sensing maps.

Paper long abstract:

The paper investigates the relation between water management and state formation in Ethiopia, in a large scale irrigation investment in an Ethiopian traditional "frontiers", the Beles lowlands.

I combine ethnographic visual research with remote sensing maps on water productivity, to contribute to the debates on the political economy of the Ethiopian developmental state and on the spatial dimension of state formation in Ethiopia. I discuss transformations and continuities in the practices of people and resources control by the current Ethiopian government, situating these practices at the interplay of different scales (international-Nile basin level, national-federal, regional and local), and looking at:

i) continuities and transformation in the representation of an old frontier, both in the government development projects and in the aspirations of different waves of resettlement and migration from the highlands;

ii) the symbolic and material making of a new centre, the sugar project managed by the federal level and attracting new flows of investments and people, resource accumulation and exploitation;

iii) the dynamics of exclusion at the margins of the irrigation scheme, with farmers dispossessed from their land and means of livelihood.

I suggest a main contradiction in the developmental state at work: on the one side, through the territorialisation process related to large scale investments, the State increases its capacity in terms of territory control, resource accumulation and surplus extraction. On the other side, these process contribute to social and economic complexity, and spatial mobility that render a significant portion of the population - and their development aspirations - invisible to the government rigid ideology and practices of political mobilization.