Modernization through capitalization: The hidden costs of Ethiopia’s Gibe III Dam and NESTown initiative

Building on recent work by Timothy Mitchell, this article interrogates the concept of capitalization, understood here specifically as models of extracting or capturing streams of future revenue for the present. In the context of urbanizing Ethiopia, national political and business leaders, international-development actors, and academics leverage agrarian–industrial transformations to persuade and justify monetizing the future through capitalization. I argue that far from a speculative mechanism to gain competitive advantage and accrue more investments later, Ethiopian development projects reveal how capitalization has a very physical and tangible footprint, serving to commodify the future, now. Ethiopian capitalization requires deep political and juridical continuities, revealed in institutional and developmental through lines from the country’s Derg regime to present governance by the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Drawing on historical and contemporary archival analysis, I conceptually interrogate the process and effects of capitalization in Ethiopia first theoretically, and then through two spatially distinct cases of agrarian–industrial transformation in Ethiopia—the Gibe III Dam and the ongoing transformation of the New Ethiopian Sustainable Town (NESTown) initiative by private developers and government actors. Gibe III echoes past large-scale hydroelectric projects and NESTown echoes a history of villagization, “planned cities,” and high-modernist state-building. The cases show how historical and contemporary visions for “development” in Ethiopia steer toward models of greater capitalization, with outcomes that destroy ecosystems and livelihoods. These findings reveal capitalization’s presence and footprints, and suggest more radical institutional arrangements that do not force Ethiopia to financialize its future.