Governing the Periphery: Ethiopia's PSNP in Somali Region

The change in relationship between pastoralists and central government brought about by Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) is explored in the article “Development, governmentality and the sedentary state: the productive safety net programme in Ethiopia’s Somali pastoral periphery” by Getu Demeke Alene et al (The Journal of Peasant Studies 2021 DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2021.1945044). The case of the PSNP is presented as an example of how bottom-up development practices in the Global South govern nomadic pastoralists in the peripheries of a country. Based on fieldwork in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, the authors show that PSNP practices of client targeting, community-based public works and (international) financial resource flows have advanced sedentarisation and the order of a sedentary State in pastoral peripheries more than top-down State attempts to settle pastoralists had ever done before. Bottom-up development practice was used as a tool for state-building in the periphery.