Zhang, Jing; (2024) Investigating the Politics of Policy Learning: The Industrial Park Programme in Ethiopia and its Engagement with China. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Africa’s economic landscape has long been blighted by a slow pace of industrialisation and uncertainties about its growth prospects. Whilst policy reforms framed by the Washington Consensus failed, the economic success of East Asia in the last few decades provided alternative lessons. Based on greatly renewed interests in industrial policy at the turn of the 21st century, this research asks how African latecomers learn to industrialise through formulating and implementing industrial policy: to what extent; through what mechanism; and what is the role of external actors. By tracing the development of the industrial park programme in Ethiopia and its engagement with China, the research goes beyond a normative agenda of policy learning in a broader academic and policy discussion. It explores the role of underlying politics in shaping the dynamics of ‘learning by emulation’ and ‘learning by doing’, urging caution to those vocal but apolitical readings of policy learning as a straightforward process of capacity building or knowledge utilisation. Specifically, based on an adapted political settlement framework, this research operationalises policy learning into different types of policy changes, which are induced by the interaction between ideas and actors on a transitional scale. At the same time, it examines the structural impacts of ‘politics’ on policy learning from the perspectives of formal institutions, power relations and paradigmatic ideas. The findings identify the importance and urgency of building a coalition, both ideationally and materially, that shall ensure legitimacy and align interests among a wide range of domestic elites, thereby uncovering the political opportunities and constraints on which policy learning may facilitate a process of institutional building. The findings also highlight the complex interaction between domestic political elites and external actors, encouraging future research to pay more attention to the configuration of individuals, organisations and their interaction in shaping the process and prospects of Africa’s late industrialisation.

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