The Politics of Youth Employment and Policy Processes in Ethiopia

Policy processes are inherently shaped by political contexts. One way of identifying the impact of politics on policy processes is by examining how policy narratives and framings evolve through time. This article examines youth employment-focused policies in Ethiopia between 2004 and 2015. It argues that policy narratives and framings driving youth employment policy are directly derived from the developmental orientation of the incumbent Ethiopian regime. The 2005 post-election political crisis also played a major role in streamlining youth-focused policy processes

The Democratic Developmental State: North-South Perspectives

The concept of a democratic developmental state is part of the current development discourse advocated by international aid agencies, deliberated on by academics, and embraced by policymakers in many emerging economies in the global South. What is noticeable in this discourse is how little attention has been paid to a discussion of the essence of a democratic developmental state, and much of what passes for theory is little more than policy-speak and political rhetoric.This volume fills a gap in the literature on the democratic developmental state. Analyzing the different approaches to the implementation of democratic developmental states in various countries, it evaluates the extent to which these are merely replicating the central tenets of the East Asian model of the developmental state or if they are succeeding in their attempts to establish a new and more inclusive conceptualization of the state. In particular, the authors scrutinize to what degree the attempts to build a democratic developmental state may be distorted by the imperatives of neoliberalism. The volume broadens the understanding of the Nordic model of a democratic developmental state and shows how it represents an additional, and perhaps contending understanding of the developmental state derived from the East Asian experience.Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) at the University of BergenpublishedVersio