Decentralized Governance under Centralized Party Rule in Ethiopia: The Tigray Experience

Abstract

In the mid-1990s Ethiopia adopted a federal constitution promising regional autonomy and the creation and strengthening of local government units below the regional level. Some observers attribute the various shortcomings of Ethiopian federalism that have emerged since then to the original institutional/constitutional design. This paper, however, argues that what is not in the constitution has come to influence the workings of decentralization more than what is codified in it. The dominant national party in power, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), either directly or through affiliates, controls political office at all levels of government, thereby limiting the room for local initiative and autonomy. The presence of a national dominant party limits the responsiveness and downward accountability of Wereda (district) authorities; it also undermines political competition, and by extension, good governance at the grassroots level. The paper is based on field research carried out in the Tigray regional state of Ethiopia. The conclusion is that when one party dominates the politics of the region and its institutions, extra-constitutional intra-party politics determine how things work, thereby subjugating localities’ autonomy and impeding their ability to deliver on promises of decentralization.     

Ethnic Decentralization and the Challenges of Inclusive Governance in Multiethnic Cities: The Case of Dire Dawa,Ethiopia

Abstract

Ethnic decentralization which could emerge in the form of autonomy and/or federalism has become an important way of responding to the challenges of ethno-nationalist conflicts. Since 1991, Ethiopia has adopted an ethnic federal structure which provides territorial autonomy to its various ethnic groups. This approach to autonomy, however, has brought challenges to multiethnic cities and ethnic borderlands where different ethnic groups coexist. By examining the experience of Dire Dawa, the second largest city in Ethiopia, this article shows how federalism and territorial autonomy by themselves are not enough to address problems of participatory governance in multiethnic cities. The article finally underscores the need for policy innovations that would ensure power-sharing in multiethnic cities.     

Catalysts for Cooperation: Non-Governmental Organizations in Santo Domingo

Abstract

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in development work have aimed traditionally to carry out infrastructure or human development in developing areas, but they have increasingly pursued the development of civic life as a pathway to democracy. Drawing on case studies from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, this article points to ways in which NGOs can help to foster cooperation among other key sectors in civil society, namely grass-roots organizations (GROs) in poor neighbourhoods. Such cooperation cultivates solidarity among the marginalized and allows GROs working together to make demands on the political system and to enhance democracy in less developed countries. The maintenance of grass-roots autonomy is a key to success in fostering cooperation, along with a clear understanding by NGOs of the local context.     

Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of the Artwork

Abstract

In this essay I want to show that while the concept of autonomy can hardly make a meaningful contribution to the understanding of contemporary artworks, the concept of the dignity of artwork can make such a contribution.     

The international rule of law

ABSTRACT

The rule of law is a moral ideal that protects distinctive legal values such as generality, equality before the law, the independence of courts, and due process rights. I argue that one of the main goals of an international rule of the law is the protection of individual and state autonomy from the arbitrary interference of international institutions, and that the best way to codify this protection is through constitutional rules restraining the reach of international law into the internal affairs of a state. State autonomy does not have any intrinsic value or moral status of its own. Its value is derivative, resulting from the role it plays as the most efficient means of protecting autonomy for individuals and groups. Therefore, the goal of protecting state autonomy form the encroachment of international law will have to be constrained by, and balanced against the more fundamental goal of an international rule of law, the protection of the autonomy of individual persons, best realized through the entrenchment of basic human rights.     

Self-determination,group identity and the common will

ABSTRACT

Anna Stilz defends a political autonomy account of self-determination that, she argues, best explains our intuitions about why colonization, annexation and foreign occupation are wrong. These are wrong, on Stilz’s view, because they unilaterally coerce individuals living under those systems of government. I argue that Stilz does not show that her account of self-determination explains our intuitions about autonomy in these kinds of cases, because she does not have a separate argument for the value of belonging to particular political groups.     

Agency Autonomy Actually: Managerial Strategies,Legitimacy, and the Early Development of the European Union's Agencies for Drug and Food Safety Regulation

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, a series of regulatory agencies has been created at the European Union (EU) level. The existing literature on EU agencies focuses either on autonomy as a reason for the creation of such agencies or on the autonomy that they are granted by design. As a result, we do not know much about how EU agencies' actual autonomy comes about. This article therefore probes into the early development of two specific agencies. On the basis of document analysis and interviews with agency staff members, national experts, EU officials, external stakeholders, and clients, it explores why, in practice, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) seems to have developed a higher level of autonomy than the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), even though on paper EMA appears to be as autonomous as, or if anything, less autonomous than EFSA. The article demonstrates the importance of investigating the managerial strategies of EU regulatory agencies to understand the actual practice of their autonomy and points to legitimacy as a key condition affecting the early development of such agencies.     

Globalization and Social Movement Resistance: The Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas,Mexico

The rebellion launched by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994 in Chiapas, Mexico is best understood not as a guerrilla struggle for state power, but rather a social movement resisting the dominant mode of globalization being imposed from above. Examining the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of globalization as a set of contested processes, this case study of resistance shows how the Zapatistas have contested power in spheres above and below the nation-state, appealing to global networks and universal rights, but also to local practices and identities. Globalization can paradoxically open new political space for contestation as it ruptures existing patterns of relations between state and civil society. This movement points to an important alternative strategy of "globalization from below," based on the radically democratic demand for autonomy, defined as the right to choose the forms of interaction with forces that are reorganizing on a global scale.     

Fake and Dishonest: Pathologies of Differentiation of the Civil and the Political Sphere in Hungary

ABSTRACT

Almost 25 years has passed since transition, and Hungarian democracy is in a deplorable state. Party politics pervades every aspect of political life, undermining the autonomy of civil actors, treating them as a potential ‘fan club’ of parties rather than cooperating and consultative partners. In order to capture what went wrong in Hungarian civil society, we propose a structural analysis that highlights pathologies of the differentiation between the political and civil spheres. We elucidate how the political sphere usurps the autonomy of the civil sphere; thereby not only does it undermine trust in civil actors, but also undercuts their capacity to perform their control function over the political sphere. In the analysis, we concentrate on what we identify as the ‘fake-civil/pseudo-civil’ phenomenon and related discourses, relying on the conceptual and theoretical apparatus developed by Arato and Cohen.     

Horizontal coordination in cooperative federalism: The purpose of ministerial conferences in Germany

ABSTRACT

Intergovernmental councils in Germany comprise 18 sectoral ministerial conferences and the prime ministerial conference as peak organization. They complement the Bundesrat as institutions of Intergovernmental Relations in the German system of cooperative federalism, dealing with matters of shared rule as well as self-rule. Based on expert interviews among ministerial bureaucrats, this contribution finds that contrary to conventional wisdom, vertical influence and autonomy protection are not their main purpose. Rather, they serve primarily information exchange and coordination. Still, the emphasis on either influence and autonomy protection or coordination and information as well as the directions of interaction vary across policy sectors. We further investigate constitutional allocation of power and party political composition as determinants on the specific purpose of ministerial conferences. The findings suggest that the allocation of power is more important than party political composition in explaining variation between sectoral ministerial conferences.     

Federalism in Africa: Origins,Operation and (In)Significance

Abstract

Recent years have seen major advances in the comparative study of federalism and a growing literature on decentralization in Africa, but there has been surprisingly little systematic comparison of African federalism. This article explains several commonalities in the origins and operation of Africa's three main federal states: Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa. Each country used ‘holding-together’ federalism in order to accommodate ethnic pluralism. Each country—especially Ethiopia and South Africa—also experienced several key centripetal forces: dominant governing parties, top-down state administration and high degrees of fiscal centralism. Federalism mattered in offering accommodative decentralization, but in its operation subnational governments have limited autonomy because of these interlocking centralizing features. This African variant of federalism can have certain salutary features, even as it precludes the possibility of many of the theorized advantages of federalism that are predicated on real subnational autonomy.     

Bureaucrats and Markets in China: The Rise and Fall of Entrepreneurial Local Government

Local government entrepreneurship in China in the reform era is argued to have been, on balance, instrumental to growth and market-oriented reform.¹ Economic factors are emphasized in explaining both its rise and anticipated decline. Undeveloped markets and established local state trading networks favored agencies of the local state in exploiting business opportunities arising from deregulation. However, market development and increasing autonomy of firms are now reducing the advantage of local government business agencies, and they face a diminished and changed role.     

Paradoxical individualization: ideological polarization in the U.S. in historical-comparative and theoretical perspective

ABSTRACT

Beginning with Karl Marx, theorists have seen individual autonomy and ideology as opposing elements. Ideology was considered the product of mental, cultural or social constraints. People did not choose their world view – they fell victim to it. With the increase of individual autonomy, however, ideology would wither away. In the late 20th century, the advocates of individualization theory have similarly predicted the vanishing of clear-cut ideological divisions in a world in which any form of collective identity was difficult to sustain. Political eclecticism and the mixing of different political world views would become the new norm. Politics was now ‘beyond left and right’, as Anthony Giddens once famously argued. In my article, I show that this understanding of the relationship between individualization and ideological polarization is flawed. By discussing the extreme ideological polarization in the U.S., I disprove the notion that our need for ideology vanishes the more our freedoms expand. On the contrary, precisely the increase in individual autonomy – in terms of mobility patterns, media use and lifestyle differentiation – has helped to turn the country into a series of closed echo chambers and to deepen the ideological fault lines of American society.     

Korea's technological development

Abstract

Indigenous peoples’ rights, including the right to self-determination, are increasingly codified in international law and policy and disseminated globally by international organizations. These norms mark a profound change in the ideals of citizenship promoted by the international community, away from linguistically and institutionally homogenous citizenship in centralized states to group-differentiated citizenship in decentralized, multi-level and multi-lingual states that use local and regional autonomy for the accommodation of indigenous peoples. Essential to realizing these norms is the devolution of some degree of autonomy to sub-central state units substantially controlled by indigenous communities. Because the transfer of powers to indigenous peoples is crucial to their accommodation, protection and participation in modern states, and because decentralization programs are an important component of reform agendas in most developing countries, it is important to understand how these emerging norms are integrated into real-world decentralization processes.

This article analyzes the application of the World Bank's safeguards policy for indigenous peoples within the institution's support to decentralization reform in Cambodia. The analysis demonstrates that under certain circumstances, the policy not only fails to translate into effective protection but leads to outcomes diametrically opposed to its objectives. In its current design, Bank support to decentralization contributes to the marginalization of indigenous peoples in Cambodia and undermines the institutional, cultural and natural resources upon which their empowerment and participation depends. In environments in which full compliance might be unrealistic to accomplish by individual projects, safeguard obligations lead to a strategy on the part of Bank projects of avoiding geographical and policy areas that are likely to trigger the safeguards policy, in order to reduce projects’ vulnerability to non-compliance claims. The article discusses how more effective application of the safeguards policy might be achieved and how strategies for the empowerment of indigenous peoples can more effectively draw on decentralization frameworks.     

Deciding to Provide: Local Decisions on Providing Social Welfare

Fiscal federalism predicts local governments will avoid social welfare expenditures, owing to capital mobility across local jurisdictions. Yet Census of Governments data consistently show that many local governments provide one or more social welfare functions, and moreover many jurisdictions provide these functions without federal or state intergovernmental support. This article finds evidence that, while local expenditures are largely driven by fiscal capacity and federal and state assistance, local decisions on providing social welfare functions and participating in intergovernmental revenues are primarily affected by degree of capital mobility and by local political factors. Consequently, local governments exercise much greater autonomy over social welfare policymaking than fiscal federalism suggests.     

Occupancy rights: dynamic as well as located

ABSTRACT

Anna Stilz’s Territorial Sovereignty (2019) aims to be a revisionist account of territorial rights that puts the value of individual autonomy first, without giving up the value of collective self-determination. In what follows I examine Stilz’s definition of occupancy rights and her emphasis on the moral relevance of what she calls ‘located’ life plans. I suggest that, if it aims at being truly revisionist, her theory should work with a broader definition of occupancy. So long as it doesn’t, these rights will be mainly the preserve of groups of settlers and peoples with predictable patterns of movement. Moreover, insofar as occupancy rights ground collective rights to self-determination, they actually have the potential to trump individual rights to what I call ‘dynamic’ or non-located occupancy. This is worrying, I claim, for at least two reasons. First, rights to dynamic occupancy are arguably as central for respecting individual autonomy as rights to located occupancy. And second, rights to dynamic ocupancy should be seen as key in helping to form the kind of political allegiances required to overcome the most pressing collective action problems that humanity faces.     

Measuring Local Autonomy in 39 Countries (1990–2014)

Local autonomy is a highly valued feature of good governance. The continuous efforts of many European countries to strengthen the autonomy of local government show the importance given to decentralization and the transfer of far-reaching competences to the lowest units. Measuring and comparing local autonomy, however, has proven to be challenging. Not only are there diverging ideas about the core elements of local autonomy, there are also considerable difficulties applying specific concepts to different countries. This paper outlines a comprehensive methodology for measuring local autonomy. It analyses 39 European countries and reports changes between 1990 and 2014. A network of experts on local government assessed the autonomy of local government of their respective countries on the basis of a common code book. The 11 variables measured show an overall increase of local autonomy but significant variation between the countries. The variables also add up to an overall measurement of local autonomy.     

The roots of the Lega Nord’s populist regionalism

ABSTRACT

Newth’s paper contributes to a greater understanding of the connection between regionalism and radical-right ideology by examining the roots of the Italian Lega Nord’s regionalist, populist and nativist discourse with a new framework of populist regionalism. By analysing the discourse of two waves of regionalist activism in Lombardy and Piedmont, represented respectively by movements for regional autonomy (MRAs) and the Lega Nord (Northern League), Newth underlines a significant connection between populist regionalism and the radical right, represented by the process of Othering directed against both internal and external migrants. At the same time, examination of narratives used during these two waves of activism reveals differences—at times nuanced, at times more explicit—between their respective populist and nativist identities.     

Intergovernmental councils in the United States

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on intergovernmental councils (IGCs) in the United States in which prominent state-level executive politicians, that is, governors, play a leadership role. In the US case, these IGCs developed out of a desire to facilitate interstate information exchanges and a need for state governments to join forces to protect their autonomy vis-à-vis the federal government. In this latter role, the councils function as lobbyists for state government interests. The research question driving the analysis has to do with impact: what difference do executive-led IGCs make, either vertically or horizontally, in the US federal system? The question of impact is particularly relevant because growing partisan polarization in contemporary federal and state political institutions complicates collective action by states.     

Autonomy and Psychic Socialization: From Non-Alienated Labour to Non Surplus Repressive Sublimation

Abstract

The work of Herbert Marcuse, unlike that of certain of his col leagues at the Institut für Sozialforschung, is most often maligned as being excessively positive and identitarian. His work on Freud, for example, is criticized for being grounded in a crude biological determinism which points towards an ultimate reconciliation of both psychic and social conflict. This essay will attempt to counter such readings by critically juxtaposing Marcuse's concept of non-repressive sublimation with Cornelius Castoriadis's understanding of psychic socialization. It will be suggested that the affinities between Marcuse and Castoriadis's appropriations of Freudian metapsychology reveals the degree to which the former can be read as a radical democratic thinker affirming the values of autonomy and creativity. This reading demonstrates that Marcuse has much to contribute to contemporary debates on the role of the aesthetic and the sensuous in democratic theory.