Contesting Modernist Land Development

Using an ethnographic case study of the sugarcane industry in the Omo Valley, Ethiopia, this article documents and analyses the state’s modernist development approach and the responses it has triggered among pastoralists. The study highlights vernacular modernism in land development, characterised by state-dominated efforts to restructure peripheral society and the environment using a development model centred on land, water and labour, and mobilising the state’s bureaucracy, power and counterinsurgencies. This agrarian-based muscular development intervention disregards pastoralists’ communal land tenure, customary norms and institutions of resource governance, and livelihood choices. This modernist strategy has also compelled the pastoralists to cooperate with the sugar industry, offering a conditional consent of “let’s see” as a conscious strategy to adapt to hegemony and carve out a space to contest. This study highlights the pastoralists’ agency, manifesting a dilemma of inclusion and exclusion, and an evolving centre–periphery relationship, shaped mainly by the state’s coercive modernist development approach.