Beyond the ‘Developmental State’: Prosperity and Conflict after the EPRDF

This chapter examines the unravelling of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF’s) state-hydro model and the foreign policy that underpinned Ethiopia’s Nile ambitions. Popular protests gathered pace from 2015, eventually forcing the EPRDF into reform by 2018, while the failure of the EPRDF’s megaprojects to deliver economically led to an increasingly unsustainable debt burden. The result has been severe political instability within Ethiopia, leading to the outbreak of civil war in 2020, and a greatly weakened position from which to negotiate the operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). Construction of the final megaprojects of the EPRDF era—the GERD and Koysha—has continued, but at a slow pace as financial and capacity constraints have become apparent. Furthermore, the debt crisis and regime change led the new government to abandon the state-hydro model of the past, with Western donors instead pressing for private investment and renewable technologies to expand electricity generation.