Mapping and Explaining Regional Policy Autonomy Asymmetry in a Constitutionally Symmetrical Federation: The Case of Ethiopia, 1995-2020

Constitutionally symmetrical federations try to treat all constituent units equally. Practically, however, this is impossible because cross-regional variation in wealth, development and other factors can lead to autonomy asymmetry. For instance, if we take estate tax, though all regions may have equal formal powers, constituent units with expensive property will collect much higher taxes than remote rural regions. Similarly, cross-regional differences such as capacity and peripherality can generate de facto autonomy variation across regions that needs to be systematically measured. I use Ethiopia, the most prominent late 20th-century adoption of federalism, as a case to assess the nexus between cross-regional de facto differences and regional policy autonomy. I take the education and land policies as a case to measure regional legislative and administrative autonomy. I developed a coding scheme, and regional officials assigned scores at five-year intervals (1995-2020), enabling me to map regional policy autonomy. I found that regional de facto policy autonomy varies temporally and spatially. Though the constitution assigns precisely the same competencies to the regions in Ethiopia, some regions experienced more de facto policy centralisation than others. Drawing on interviews, academic articles, news sources and policy documents, I argue that spatial policy autonomy asymmetry in Ethiopia can be explained by regional capacity variation, peripherality, and a shift of national development priorities. Accordingly, relatively developed regions with better capacity have relative policy autonomy. Further, peripheral regions tend to experience more policy centralisation than others. Moreover, the shift in national development priorities and the federal government’s approaches towards developing regions appears to have caused relative centralisation in these units. These factors are primarily region-specific and might reinforce each other in shaping the actual policy autonomy of the regions, generating territorial policy autonomy inequality. Insights from the Ethiopian case have wider theoretical, methodological and policy implications. Theoretically, it shows how codified rules operate under uncodified norms of the dominant party regimes in developing countries. Methodologically, insights from Ethiopia confirms previous works’ assertion that constitutional texts cannot reveal much about a federation because gaps exist between the formal and the practice. Hence, scholarly works of federalism should go beyond the constitution to investigate the de jure-de facto gap and identify a range of factors intercepting the process of putting the constitution into practice. Besides, insights from Ethiopia can have broader implications for states embracing federalism such as Nepal, South Sudan, and Somalia and countries such as Indonesia, Myanmar and Sri Lanka that have institutionalised power-sharing arrangements. It shows the need to consider regional inequality in development and capacity in designing a constitution and implementing federalism.