Introduction

Climate change has become a matter of global environmental justice (Selby, 2010). This is particularly the case in Africa, where countries that have contributed little to global carbon emissions face harsh consequences for impending climate disruption. In Ethiopia, those consequences involve persistent droughts, shorter growing seasons, shifting rainfall patterns, reduced agricultural production, and greater food insecurity. Climate change is also expected to result in intensified income inequality within the next 35 to 60 years (Hadgu et al., 2015; Mideksa, 2010; Siraj et al., 2014) as well as increased migration of youth to Europe and the Arab World. Such slow-creeping but pervasive impacts of climate change will surely make life in the Horn of Africa harsher than ever.

While climate change poses a long-term threat to Ethiopia, more localized and immediate environmental problems are also cause for alarm. Just one example: in early 2017, more than 100 people were killed in a landslide … a landslide of garbage, or “trash avalanche” (Ahmed & Fortin, 2017). What happened was this: a large landfill outside the capital city of Addis Ababa was home to hundreds of poor people with nowhere else to live. When a section of the landfill gave way, homes and human beings were crushed under a landslide of solid waste. This episode points directly to the nexus of environmental sustainability and social justice, as well as the vulnerability of extremely poor, marginalized urban populations to toxic environmental conditions.

In the past, environmental protection has sometimes been framed as a long-term concern that can be sacrificed in the short term for the sake of economic growth. However, the intensified severity of environmental problems and their social justice implications calls for a new kind of leadership that is attuned to the interconnections of ecology and social equity as integral to national development. In a country like Ethiopia where rapid economic growth has become a coveted (and often unchallenged) prize, we suggest that leadership – across the institutional landscape – should be reoriented toward concern for ecological responsibility and social justice.

However, we suggest that the expectations for environmental leadership should be contextualized in relation to cultural traditions and institutional constraints. We favor a locally grounded approach to environmental leadership, anchored in the limitations and possibilities of particular places. In this respect, we challenge a sometimes assumed ideal in environmentally oriented leadership discourse of an “eco-champion” leader who can operate fluidly in an unbounded (or undefined) cultural/geographic space. In other words, we suggest that the “where” of environmental leadership matters as much as the “why” and the “what.”

The economic and social conditions in Ethiopia vary greatly from the conditions for leadership found in the West. For one, centralized control of institutional authority limits possibilities for local initiative. The government tends to monopolize strategic leadership and dictate solutions from the center, leaving little space available for alternative discourses or local initiatives to gain legitimacy. Another distinctive feature of Ethiopia is its deeply rural, agrarian character. In Ethiopia, more than 80 percent of the population live on the land and work in small-scale (often subsistence) agriculture. Thus, there is both an immediate dependence on local natural resources for survival and deep indigenous understanding of local ecologies. At the same time, though, we observe limited popular awareness of the causes of environmental deterioration. Strong cultural/religious traditions associate drought and climate change with divine punishment for wrongful action. Such traditions may limit critical understanding and motivation to address climate change, and should be taken seriously within any localized conceptualization of environmental leadership.

While broadly agrarian, Ethiopia defies geographic generalization. Ethiopia encompasses hundreds of unique microenvironments (culturally and geographically), ranging from the Danakil depression to Rift Valley lakes, farmlands, rugged canyons of the Nile, deserts, and the tangled urbanity of Addis Ababa. In light of such profuse diversity, environmental leadership may evolve differently across the Ethiopian landscape – but only if more generally favorable conditions for the emergence of environmental leadership can be created across the geographic, cultural, religious, and institutional landscape.

Little is known about environmental leaders in Ethiopia. In a recent study of 75 corporate sustainability leaders, Schein (2015) found that corporate sustainability leaders in the United States and Europe are often motivated by ecological worldviews rooted in their sense of relationship with the natural world. These individuals often developed early connections to nature as children. Schein also noted that corporate leaders’ concern for social equity is often linked to eye-opening observations of injustice in the developing (majority) world. Such research, while valuable in exploring the origins of environmental leadership in the West, may not explain how sustainability leadership emerges in very different locations. We wonder about the origins of ecological awareness among leaders whose lives are grounded in rural environments, where the subsistence rhythms of agricultural life are close at hand. We wonder, too, about the social justice concerns of those whose personal experiences of race, ethnicity, and economic equity may be more visceral than for those in more comfortable circumstances in the West who grew up looking at injustice from a greater distance. In this chapter, we sketch our perspective on the challenges of environmental leadership in the Ethiopian context, mindful of both the real constraints and the urgency of change.

The Impact of a Changing Climate in Ethiopia

Before exploring the constraints and challenges of environmental leadership in Ethiopia, we briefly review the impact of climate change to highlight the urgency of environmental activism and leadership. In Ethiopia, agriculture supports 83–85 percent of the nation’s population in both employment and livelihood (Bezabih et al., 2014; Iscaro, 2014). The agricultural sector produces 40–50 percent of the nation’s GDP and around 85 percent of export earnings. Given its high level of dependence on agriculture, Ethiopia is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change (Aragie, 2013). That vulnerability is heightened by low adaptive capacity at an organizational level and lack of a widely-accessible technology infrastructure (Robinson et al., 2013; Yohannes, 2016).

As suggested earlier, climate change is expected to alter traditional rainfall patterns and disrupt the seasonal patterns of agricultural work established over hundreds of years. In southern Ethiopia, climate change will likely affect the production of Arabica coffee due to increased temperature, reduced precipitation, and more pervasive crop pests. Coffee is the major source of foreign exchange that covers around 33 percent of Ethiopia’s exports (Iscaro, 2014). According to Alebel et al. (2015), the textile and sugar sector also are key strategic export commodities. Climate change poses great risks to the production of cotton and sugarcane and may limit the foreign currency earning of the country. A recent analysis forecasts that Ethiopia could lose up to 6 percent of its agricultural output yearly due to reduced rainfall if current climate change trends continue (Aragie, 2013). Therefore, for a country whose economy is highly dependent on agriculture (especially crop production and livestock), the cost of climate change will be severe.

Moreover, climate change is expected to have negative public health consequences. According to a recent report issued by USAID (2016), Ethiopia has a high prevalence of climate-sensitive diseases. The report indicated that roughly 70 percent of the population lives in malaria-endemic areas and outbreaks that occur every five to eight years account for up to 20 percent of deaths for children under the age of five. With climatic change expected to increase temperatures – little by little, decade by decade – the geographic range of malaria will expand (Siraj et al., 2014). Rising temperatures will enable malaria-carrying mosquitoes to move up the mountains, affecting greater segments of the highland population. Forecasts also suggest that increased potential for flooding will facilitate the spread of waterborne diseases like diarrhea and cholera. In addition, as a result of greater food insecurity, NGOs have estimated that several million children in Ethiopia will be threatened by malnutrition (Save the Children, 2016). These predictions indicate the depth and breadth of the impact of climate change on human well-being and economic vitality across Ethiopia. Climate change has the potential to impede economic progress and reverse the gains made in Ethiopia’s development unless measures are taken to alleviate the situation (Redda & Roland, 2016).

Government Initiatives to Address Climate Change

Over the past decade, Ethiopia has pursued turbo-charged economic growth, with rates of economic expansion hovering near 10 percent in recent years. This rate of economic growth is among the highest in Africa, if not the world, only falling below the growth levels of India and China (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, 2011). Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa, now boasts multiple symbols of economic modernity, including a Chinese-engineered light rail system for mass transit and new cargo train link with Djibouti. A modern expressway extends from the capital city to nearby economic hubs, another expression of the nation’s emerging economic power.

While pursuing accelerated growth, the Government of Ethiopia is well aware of the environmental challenges the country faces and appears to be taking active measures to move the country toward a more sustainable economy. Ethiopia already produces a large share of its electricity from hydropower, and the government has issued a number of policies and strategies to address climate change, including a “green economy strategy” that promises to enable Ethiopia to reach its ambitious economic growth targets while keeping greenhouse gas emissions low (FDRE, 2011).

The Ethiopian green economy strategy focuses on protecting and reestablishing forests, improving crop and livestock production practices for higher food security and farmer income while reducing emissions, expanding electricity generation from renewable energy, and shifting to energy efficient technologies in transportation and construction, among other sectors (FDRE, 2011). Overall, the strategy is intended to lower the current environmental impact of carbon emissions in the country and achieve economic development targets in a way that overcomes the potential conflict between economic growth and ecological protection.

Even though the components of the green economy strategy are sound, the government has made few significant achievements in implementing the policy over the past five years. Much of the expected work remains in the proposal or planning stage. On the ground, government activities focus on the protection of soil through planting of trees, terracing and building ditches, and preventing overgrazing. However, these efforts often seem driven by political interests in establishing the public appearance of environmental care more than establishing sustainable conservation practices at a community level. In some cases, farmers and other community members are forced to plant trees and prepare ditches and canals (usually once a year) in order for the government to produce media images of locally based environmental protection. In reality, such media-focused efforts are quickly abandoned until the next round of government visits.

Perhaps the central problem of environmental protection in Ethiopia is this: Environmental policies and strategies are not fully owned by the larger community. As a result, environmental protection efforts often appear artificial, shallow, and inconsistent. Such efforts tend to be top-down, government-sponsored agendas that lack local support. The government has made inadequate efforts to raise awareness among rural populations about environmental protection, including understanding of the causes and effects of climatic change or strategies for climate adaptation. Government has done little to mobilize environmental leadership at a local level or authorize and support locally driven environmental protection strategies. Strategy development remains highly centralized and bureaucratized (Gebissa, 2010). Within the government’s green economy strategy document, for example, the only references to “leadership” are made in reference to the Prime Minister’s office (and related government experts). From our standpoint, this is part of the problem: a highly centralized grip on leadership is a key cause of the drought of environmental leadership.

Contextual Barriers to Environmental Leadership

In Ethiopia, we have observed multiple obstacles to environmental leadership. We will identify and explore several of those barriers, including the following: 1) centralized control of leadership functions; 2) theological notions of climate disruption as a divine punishment for collective sin; 3) lack of systemic environmental awareness at the grassroots level.

By highlighting these barriers, our intention is not to argue against the possibility or the importance of environmental leadership. Rather, we suggest that environmental leadership must be understood in light of these constraints, so that they can be reshaped to leverage more conducive conditions for the emergence of local forms of environmental leadership. A contextually grounded, constraint-conscious approach to environmental leadership in Ethiopia (and Africa generally) can speak more authentically to emerging environmental leaders and generate more productive local dialogue about what environmental leadership looks like, how it works, and how it could contribute to the well-being of local communities over time.

1. Top-Down Centralized Control of Institutional Direction and Decisions

Since the fall of the communist regime in 1991, Ethiopia has been ruled by a single political party. In the 2016 national election, the ruling party won 100 percent of the seats in parliament, signaling its stranglehold on power to all potential political rivals (Arriola & Lyons, 2016). In a political environment of heavy-handed one-party rule, government is the central actor in all aspects of Ethiopian life. Institutional leaders receive their authorization from the government (either regional or central) and maintain their legitimacy through their ability to effectively implement government directives. In practice, leaders in Ethiopia are not encouraged to think independently and empower their followers to do the same. Rather, leaders in Ethiopia learn to make safe decisions that align closely with the strategies of the central government. A common phrase that middle-managers hear is “for your implementation.” In our observations of educational institutions, it seems that mid-level leaders typically take directives from the top without questioning, and then pass the burden of implementation to lower-level officials and line workers. Ethiopians refer to this practice as “tikus denich” (passing the “hot potato”). This tradition affords little autonomy for middle managers to take alternative stances or pursue independent initiatives (Shimelis et al., 2017). At all levels, institutional leaders in Ethiopia are expected to hold instrumental views about the purpose of their work, aligned with normative national discourses, i.e., that the ultimate goal of leadership is advancing national economic development.

In this context, greater institutional attention to climate change and a thousand other local eco-justice challenges is unlikely, until there is greater openness to alternative viewpoints. In this respect, even the national “green economy strategy” may become a barrier to local dialogue and decision making, since it appears that the central government has found the solution to climate change and that the official strategy should be implemented as written, rather than critically examined and adapted to meet local needs.

2. Religious Traditions That View Climate Change as “Divine Punishment”

In the West, public debates about the nature of climate change often revolve around the quality or scope of scientific evidence. In a deeply conservative society as found in Ethiopia, however, attribution for the causes of climate change can also include religious concerns. Climate change in Ethiopia is often perceived, at a community level, as having both spiritual and scientific dimensions. In a recent survey of 60 local farmers in northern Ethiopia, most respondents pointed to local land use practices such as deforestation and overgrazing as contributing to climate change, with a small percentage (7 percent) also pointing to sinful action as the key cause (Tesfahunegn et al., 2016).

The theological attribution of climate change speaks both to the power of religious thinking in a traditional society as well as the relative thinness of scientific understanding of climate change from a global perspective among the broader population. With regard to persistent drought, famine, desertification, and depletion of soil fertility, people tend to hold fatalistic outlooks. Many people associate such hardships with divine punishments due to transgression of God’s commandments.

Such beliefs are common to both Christian Orthodox and Islamic traditions (as well as indigenous traditions). Hence, many religious institutions admonish their followers to pray when there are prolonged droughts accompanied by famine, and even torrential rains followed by excessive and destructive flooding. Because environmental problems are frequently understood from a religious viewpoint as being caused by sinful action, religious followers may be asked to slaughter animals and pray together in nearby churches and mosques for divine intervention to reverse the situation.

In this respect, strong religious traditions position climate change as a problem to address through moral atonement and improvement, rather than policy action or adaptive organizational change. This is a vital consideration for environmental leadership in the Ethiopian context, since it must account for climate change as an issue sometimes interpreted as having a spiritual cause.

3. Lack of Environmental Awareness at a Grassroots Level

Most people of Ethiopia live an agrarian, subsistence lifestyle. Agrarian traditions hold rich understanding of local weather patterns, soil conditions, planting/harvesting cycles, and animal husbandry practices. Over generations, local farmers have developed highly contextualized working knowledge of how to sustain themselves where they live. Local farmers in Ethiopia have also demonstrated their own strategies for climate adaptation in certain areas (Gebissa, 2010). Nevertheless, local people are often ill-equipped to understand the broader patterns and implications of a changing climate. Due to limited access to media, there is limited popular access to scientific information about climate change and other environmental problems.

One of the authors had a discussion with local officials working in the agriculture sector. The discussion was about awareness of climate change, its impacts, and the role of leaders. One of the participants said the greatest challenge related to climate change is that people do not talk about it. At a village level, people might make observations about unseasonably high temperatures or uncommon rainfall patterns. A survey of farmers in northern Ethiopia found they were able to clearly identify changes in temperature and rainfall as indicators of climate change (Tesfahunegn et al., 2016). However, these observations often remain as localized snapshots. People do not have adequate access to information about climate patterns and the trajectory of incremental changes over time. As suggested above, popular thinking about climate change may also be influenced by religious explanations, associating drought or famine with divine punishment for wrongdoing, rather than providing explanations that reveal how human activity is altering natural patterns.

Land tenure in Ethiopia is a related barrier to local investment in the long-term quality of the environment. All land in Ethiopia belongs to the central government as a matter of law. This situation diminishes grassroots responsibility for environmental stewardship. Local farmers tend not to plant trees on government land because they do not feel a sense of ownership of the land and will not ultimately benefit from the trees. In this respect, central control of the land constrains longer-term thinking and limits efforts to preserve soil fertility over time.

Overall, practices of government control and discourses of divine punishment tend to remove agency from (and responsibility for) environmental leadership from ground-level leaders. We suggest that these constraints must be acknowledged as a starting point for fostering creative leadership in relation to local environmental challenges.

The Way Forward: Changing the Leadership Paradigm in Ethiopia

In nations like Ethiopia, local people can do little to limit the larger dynamics of global climate change or escape the consequences of climate disruption in the coming years. Thus, environmental leadership in Ethiopia must be attuned to resilience and adaptation. In this respect, such leadership is about strengthening the adaptive capacities of communities and organizations. That is the province of adaptive leadership, identifying the strengths of tradition and discerning (collectively) what aspects of tradition continue to serve the community and which aspects no longer serve, in order for the community to thrive in a changing environment (Heifetz et al., 2009).

In Ethiopia, resilience comes “built-into” cultural norms. Ethiopians have endured hardship and adapted to difficult conditions for hundreds of years. When faced with a physical or emotional challenge, people encourage each other through the exhortation of “izosh/izoh,” (feminine/masculine) which means, literally, “be strong.” Based on a widening body of research, it has become clear that climate change will bring intensified hardship to Ethiopia in terms of greater food insecurity, extreme weather, new vulnerabilities to malaria, etc. in the coming decades. Given this predicament, the cultural ethic of resilient strength amid adversity will be a key resource for Ethiopia’s future. To affirm the indigenous tradition of resilience, we would like to suggest that leaders should take an appreciative approach to traditional capacities for endurance, rather than echoing or amplifying rhetoric of impending environmental catastrophe that is sometimes heard in the West. Such an approach fails to honor the Ethiopian capacity for endurance.

There is no question that Ethiopians will endure climate change. But how can the project of endurance become one of creative adaptation that minimizes the damage and maximizes the capacity for resilience of local communities? Perhaps the primary task of environmental leadership in this regard is framing intensified hardship as an adaptive challenge, calling forth indigenous capacities to act creatively and responsively – amplifying local agency, resilience, and responsibility – rather than framing intensified hardship as a divine curse or inexplicable event that must be endured passively. At this level, environmental leadership in Ethiopia is an epistemological and pedagogical project. That project starts at the top, in terms of loosening expectations for leaders to implement-solutions-as-planned and opening spaces for leaders to experiment with possible-solutions-at-hand, toward greater levels of well-being for human and nonhumans alike.

This project also involves focusing collective attention on the environmental problems that can be addressed with the tools and resources at hand. Because climate change is such a large-scale, global problem whose solution seems beyond the grasp of Ethiopians, it may be an ineffective focus for mobilizing local energies. Environmental leaders at a community level, while emphasizing local adaptation and resilience in the face of the inevitable changes in temperature and rainfall patterns, can also focus attention on the close-at-hand strategies for ecological well-being, such as the reduction/elimination of plastic bags or the small-scale adoption of solar energy collection systems.

Leveraging Cultural Resources for Change

Ethiopia’s rich religious heritage suggests that environmental leadership should consider ways to include religious leaders and religious ethics into their change efforts. After all, religious traditions and institutions can be allies in disseminating environmental messages. Historically, churches in Ethiopia have functioned as small-scale nature sanctuaries. By tradition, local people are not allowed to cut trees around churches; thus, churches often sit amidst old forests and abundant wildlife. In this respect, churches can serve as indigenous examples of effective microscale conservation. To our knowledge, there has been little discussion of the potential of religiously inspired conservation to inspire environmental leadership in other social sectors.

Given Ethiopia’s strong religious traditions, another productive approach would be linking environmental leadership to notions of servant leadership. Originally inspired by the Christian religious tradition (Greenleaf, 2002), approaches to servant leadership call leaders to model a Christ-like service to others. As such, the discourse of servant leadership may find cultural resonance with traditional Orthodox religious teachings and speak to traditional religious values.

In this respect, servant leadership and environmental leadership have strong connections in that they emphasize the needs and interests of others over leaders’ self-interests and needs. If a leader cares about human well-being in a context where the vast majority of people continue to rely on subsistence agriculture, then, by extension, the servant leader must care for the environment that people rely on to grow their food and make a living. Servant leaders become stewards of people and place, stewards of community well-being nested within the larger well-being of the community’s natural support systems.

Adapting Global Leadership Discourses

A 2017 report from the Worldwatch Institute calls for “earth-centric” leadership, as part of a broader agenda of “earth education” (Assadourian, 2017). Such leadership helps organizations and communities build a sustainable future amid the disruptive consequences of climate change. According to Assadourian, earth-centric leadership involves critical consciousness, active civic engagement, and the freedom to act as a change agent. Earth-centric leaders empower others to address environmental problems and social injustice. While this approach makes sense in an open democratic environment, it can be difficult for people to act as change agents in a context where their civil rights have been constrained, as often happens in Sub-Saharan Africa and Ethiopia in particular. For that reason, we suggest that principles of environmental and “earth-centric” leadership must be adapted to fit local realities.

To enable a richly diverse expression of environmental leadership, what’s needed at the macro-level is a full recognition of environmental problems and encouragement for local leadership – rather than treating environmental leadership as the prerogative of the central government or the tragic consequence of collective moral failure.

In education, Bottery’s recent (2016) analysis of leadership for sustainability focuses on the capacities needed to address “wicked problems” of sustainability. Bottery suggests that wicked problems are often mistakenly framed as being “tame” in ways that promote simplistic, mechanistic solutions. Wicked problems cannot be solved by hierarchically driven implementation of mechanistic, centralized solutions. Wicked problems call from wicked approaches, pointing toward a “bricoleur” leader (p. 164) who experiments with multiple strategies, what Bottery refers to as “silver buckshot” rather than “silver bullets” (p. 171).

Bottery goes on to point out that a leader’s role is not finding solutions: “they [leaders] need to understand that their role should be increasingly one of asking the right questions rather than providing the right answers” (p. 171). For Bottery, sustainability leaders also need an expansive tolerance of uncertainty and slow decision making: “In a wicked world characterized by too much concern with acting quickly, the strength and ability to remain comfortable with uncertainty, to resist the temptation to reify initial thoughts until further clarity is acquired, will be a vital quality” (p. 171).

Bottery’s leaders do messy work to find their way to “clumsy solutions” (p. 172) in dialogue with multiple stakeholders. Such an approach to leadership is unlikely to flourish in an institutional environment that privileges, even demands, administrative compliance with centralized government directives. In this respect, central actors may do much to strengthen Ethiopia’s capacity for climate change adaptation and ecological justice by holding greater tolerance for questions, for slow actions, and for the uncertainty that comes from loosened control over decision making.

Even though Ethiopia will be hit hard by climate change, most people don’t know what’s coming. The issue of climate change and its practical consequences are not earnestly communicated and understood (in scientific terms) by the majority population, particularly those with low levels of literacy and limited access to international media. Greater efforts to enrich environmental literacies and deepen ecological awareness will be critical for nurturing local support for environmental leadership. Broader public understanding of climate change and the urgency of adaptive work will build more supportive conditions for environmental leadership to take root.

Concluding Implications

What can other nations learn from Ethiopia’s experience with environmental leadership? At one level, we applaud the fact that the Ethiopian government has raised the visibility of climate change and environmental issues, through discourses such as the Green Economy Strategy. Other nations can look to Ethiopian government leadership in framing economic growth in relation to long-term environmental protection. Nevertheless, we raise cautions about presumed environmental leadership from the top.

Due to the common-sense conflation of leadership with authority (particularly government authority), it’s tempting to view Ethiopia as an environmental leader. Beneath the rhetoric, however, much of the government’s efforts remain superficial and, sometimes, exaggerated for global audiences. In a one-party state like Ethiopia, the government tends to monopolize credit for environmental leadership and manage the environmental agenda. In this respect, environmental leadership from the center can mask, even limit, the vitality of environmental leadership locally. A caution about government-led environmental leadership is warranted in other settings with tight control on civil dialogue and citizen-driven initiative. Central governments have a key role in promoting environmental leadership but should not “own” that leadership role.

A second lesson: environmental leadership is practiced in specific cultural settings, and we recommend critical analysis of the cultural resources that both inhibit and promote environmental leadership. Like many other settings in Africa, rural Ethiopia is endowed with rich knowledge, gained from centuries of subsistence cultivation, of how people can sustain local soils and waters to meet human needs. Nevertheless, an industrializing economy, propelled by external investment and government ambitions to achieve rapid growth, has intensified urbanization and disconnection from place-based knowledge. How can nations like Ethiopia preserve traditions of environmental care and protection in the context of rapidly shifting aspirations and lifestyles?

In Ethiopia, traditional religions often play a dual-edged role in environmental leadership, attributing climactic catastrophes to moral failure, while also acting as agents of conservation through the protection of trees. We suggest that religious leaders have a particularly important opportunity to reframe climate change and cultural resilience as matters of human agency, problems that call forth moral responsibility rather than problems that have called down moral judgment.

Ethiopia has not yet integrated government policy pronouncements with traditional religious values to promulgate a common ethic of environmental stewardship at a community level. If environmental leadership could be infused with religious energy, environmental concerns might attract and mobilize a much broader audience. We would encourage religious, educational, civic, and business leaders to consider how they can model environmental leadership and nurture conducive conditions for such leadership to take root in local communities and institutions.

Ethiopians are widely regarded as a proud people. Ethiopians take great pride in their cultural heritage, their ethnic diversity, and the stark beauty of the land they inhabit. They have no desire for dependency on food aid as rains shift and crops wither due to climate change. Cultural pride and indigenous values of endurance can be a resource for animating environmental leadership. One of the key lessons we draw is that Ethiopia has not yet dug deep enough into its own resources to address its ongoing drought of environmental leadership.

At the same time, Western countries must better appreciate how their policy choices can push climate change and other forms of environmental degradation beyond peoples’ capacity to endure. As people in the Horn of Africa migrate northward to escape drought and famine, environmental leadership – at a global, national, and local level – becomes a more widely shared concern.

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