comparative assessment of decentralization in africa: ethiopia desk ...

3.0 POLITICAL ECONOMY OFDECENTRALIZATIONIn this section, we address the political decision making behind the decentralization process. Asnoted in the section on Political Incentives and Constraints, we find that the EPRDF hadcompelling political reasons to decentralize in the 1990s to ensure governability and facilitate aprocess of state reform and democratization. In this, we do not assume that the EPRDF wasinterested only in the ―stated goals‖ of decentralization, but that it may also have been interestedin securing its own power. In any event, we find that what was good for stability and good fordecentralization was also good for the party.3.1 POLITICAL INCENTIVES AND CONSTRAINTS: PROPONENTS ANDOPPONENTSRelating to the question of political accountability in Section 2.3 above, it may be said that manyof the central political incentives and constraints behind decentralization are found in thepolitical party system, and particularly in the dominance of the EPRDF. The power of the centralparty in the decentralized federation was such that the system originally considered a ―holdingtogether‖federation designed to accommodate Ethiopia’s peoples came to be understood bysome as a top-down ―putting-together‖ federation (Keller and Smith, 2005, p. 269; cf. Stepan,1999). As noted above, the EPRDF initially had incentives to accommodate diverse ethnicinterests with regional decentralization, but these incentives shifted as the party consolidatedpower and established its dominance in political life over the period from 1995 to the present.In light of its partisan control at all levels of the political system, the EPRDF has mixedincentives with respect to decentralization. In many instances, dominant parties should bereticent to fragment or fracture their grip on central power through decentralization. Whiledecentralizing could indeed result in such dispersal of power, the extension of political authorityto subnational levels has also accommodated large numbers of EPRDF party activists and hasclearly deepened the political linkages between the party and local populations. Putaffirmatively, this could enable effective channeling of demands from local levels to increasinglyhigher levels of government (cf. Meheret, 2007, p. 89). But the scholarship on the structure ofthe party itself points in the direction of greater degree of state control, clientelism, and top-downgovernance in which decentralized units perform more as transmission belts for centralprerogatives than for upward transmission of local demands (cf. Aalen and Tronvoll, 2008;Chanie, 2007; Kidane, 2001; inter alia). The political incentives for the EPRDF may thus be tocontinue to deepen the existing decentralization of governance, partly in the interest of improvedservice provision, but not necessarily in the interest of more bottom-up democracy.Bureaucratic politics at the ministerial level is an additional complicating factor, with some(though not all) ministries and central government officials resisting or otherwise hindering thedecentralization process. This can be both a political incentive to retain power in someETHIOPIA DESK STUDY 19