Between Control and Cooperation: Multi-Stakeholder Service Provision and the Legitimacy of State Institutions in Ethiopia’s Amhara National Regional State

Abstract

This article contributes to nascent scholarship on the relations between multi-stakeholder service delivery and state legitimacy in development settings. On the basis of qualitative analysis of two multi-stakeholder projects (MSPs) for water provision in Ethiopia, we find that the specific process of interaction between state institutions and non-state actors (both citizens and organizations) affects state legitimacy as a function of joint service delivery more profoundly than the outputs of this process. We explore this process of interaction by looking at division of roles, communication, decision making and accountability. However, placing our empirical findings in the context of Ethiopia’s broader political economy questions the effect of local MSPs on aggregated notions of legitimacy.