Policies of Yesterday Cultivating the Fields of Tomorrow : Changes and Continuities in the Ethiopian State’s Conceptualisations of LargeScale Farms, Smallholder Farmers, and the Role of the State within National Development Plans from 1950s to 2010s

Abstract: This thesis historicizes the conceptualisations of large-scale farms, smallholder farmers, and the role of the state in the Ethiopian national development plans from 1957 to 2015. It engages with the food regime framework in discussing the role of the state in contemporary agrarian change and places itself within the debate of the corporate food regime. In providing a meso-level analysis of the Ethiopian state, this thesis works to nuance the role of the state in a research field that increasingly argues that the state has become redundant as global agri-food corporations are controlling food production. This thesis also problematises how researchers writing about Ethiopia focus either on changes in agricultural policies or recent development trends, lacking the longer historical understanding and not using continuities to contrast the changes with. Using tools from Critical Discourse Analysis and the Discourse-Historical Approach in combination with a theoretical understanding of how multiple temporal layers interacts in the meaning-making process of conceptualisations within the discourse, the empirical material which constitutes of Ethiopia’s Five Year Development Plans is analysed to understand how the orders of discourse giving meaning to the concepts of large-scale farms, smallholder farmers, and the role of the state is reacting to discourses in new development plans and the long-term goals of agricultural development. This thesis concludes that although the state’s conceptualisations of the three concepts has endured changes throughout the years, orders of discourses from earlier plans are still relevant to give meaning to the concepts, thus revealing how changes, continuities, and changes within the continuities and multiple temporal layersare interacting in the meaning-making process of the development plans.