Individual and Institutional Drivers of Inequality in Rural Agricultural Contexts: Evidence from Southern Ethiopia

Ethiopia has experienced high rates of macroeconomic growth and reports a significant decline of people living in poverty. At the same time, inequality is increasing. In order to understand what is driving inequality, in particular in rural agricultural contexts, we use a mixed-methods approach rooted in knowledge coproduction. The results identify penultimate causes for reasons why individuals accumulate or lose assets and resources, as has been identified in other literature. A focus on the individual and penultimate causes, however, makes invisible the structures and systems that contribute to those occurrences. We find that individual drivers of divergence (e.g., illness, debt, death) exist within systems and structures that marginalize some while providing opportunity for others. So-called "development" activities are part of these drivers, often negatively affecting the already marginalized and vulnerable. The findings suggest that individual-and community-level interventions will only enable a certain degree of change, unless and until the structural and systemic components of inequality and marginalization are transformed.