Recent literature on large-scale land acquisitions highlights the active role of the nation-state in facilitating land deals in Africa (Wolford et al. 2013; Levien 2013). In particular, there has been a renewed focus on the role of social, political, and domestic elites in mediating access of land to foreigners (Fairbairn 2013; German et al. 2013). Fairbairn, for example, examines the role of “access” control that domestic elites in Mozambique can offer to foreign investors and how the inequality between the domestic elites and smallholder farmers can play a role in determining whether smallholder farmers are dispossessed of their land. German et al. (2013) build on Fairbairns’ argument that legal land rights for smallholder farmers can be captured by ruling elites and given to foreigners, thus serving as an instrument of de jure dispossession in sub-Saharan Africa.
While scholarship has shed light on these complex interactions between state actors and foreign investors in the role of land deals, the limited research that has looked at how states have facilitated land deals with domestic and diasporan investors has tended to broadly define these investors as “domestic” or “local” elites (Hall 2011; Baird 2014; Behrman et al. 2012). This generalization of investors obfuscates more than it illuminates; domestic and diasporan agro-investors seeking land deals are a heterogeneous group, with vast disparities in social, cultural, political, and economic capital and complex motivations for seeking such land deals.
The literature on states’ roles in facilitating land deals has also largely neglected to analyze the dynamism of land deals and why they frequently fail or have to be renegotiated. In countries like Ethiopia, economic land concessions for agro-investment have been regularly cancelled and revoked (and sometimes reinstated). Moreover, most of these land concessions have been given to domestic and diasporan investors, not the foreign investors who have received the most scholarly interest (Cotula et al. 2009).
In this paper, I will address the questions of who Ethiopia’s domestic/diasporan agro-investors are and why they seek land concessions, why the Ethiopian government is interested in giving land concessions to domestic/diasporan investors, and why these concessions are cancelled, revoked, and sometimes reinstated. I draw on my 2015-2016 fieldwork in Ethiopia, during which I made field observations in seven Ethiopian states and conducted 130 in-depth interviews (nationwide) with domestic and diasporan investors, government officials, members of local NGOS and INGOs, and local townspeople.
I make three key arguments. First, I argue that domestic and diasporan agro-investors complicate the idea of “elites” and seek land concessions both to advance their own economic interests and also to further the Ethiopian state’s development agenda. Second, the Ethiopian state seeks domestic and diasporan investors because they must fulfill both extra-legal/neopatrimonial and legal/developmental obligations to the state in the pursuit and management of their land concessions. Finally, many of these concessions are dynamic (cancelled, revoked, and reinstated) because of the tensions between neopatrimonalism and developmentalism in Ethiopia’s “shared national project of growth and transformation” (Oqubay 2015: 4).
