Analysis of the Design and Function of Tigray National Regional State Bureaucracy vis-à-vis Democratic Developmental State Requirements

One of the foundations for the success of developmental states is having strong, autonomous, and merit based bureaucracy. The government of Ethiopia has also officially declared itself to pursue a Democratic Developmental State (DDS) model. In this research undertaking, the design and function of Tigray national regional state bureaucracy was analyzed taking DDS indicators. To deal with this, a mixed research methodology was employed, in which purposively selected key informants from a total of six rural and urban districts and four offices were approached for interviews and focus group discussions. In addition, selected civil servants were made to fill a questionnaire through simple random sampling. The empirical findings of this research reveal that the bureaucracy was influenced and its autonomy undermined by the ruling elite, and it became unable to attract qualified man-power due to civil servant unfriendly political and administrative environment. There is also an excessive interference by the political leadership and fusion of party politics and government administrative issues. The guiding principle of developmental state regarding the relationship between politicians and bureaucrats is “the politicians reign while the bureaucrats rule” but the reality in the study area is the politicians reign and at the same time rule. Similarly, though majority of the bureaucrats were recruited based on merit through examinations, the institutions they operate are not autonomous. Therefore professionalism must be respected and the politics-bureaucracy interface should be also revisited