Young people spaces of rural livelihoods in post development contexts of Ethiopia (Conference Proceeding)

Contemporary theorising about spatiality in geography suggests a progressive understanding of space and place as relational (Massey, 1995). In this paper, I explore young peoples’ spaces of work in the context of rural livelihood transition from subsistence agriculture to commercial crop production in Ethiopia. I discuss the ways in which young people respond to market-driven, post-rural development realities wherein small scale farmers were encouraged by the state and, accordingly, enthusiastically abandoned their diversified farming systems to invest their land and labour in a new global crop, namely coffee, thereby stimulating a set of changes in resource access and social relations that they did not anticipate. Because of an undue reliance on single main farm out put, called mono-culture, rural families not only become extremely vulnerable when their produces faces unstable and ever declining prospects in national and international markets but their material desires have also been altered. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with young people (aged 9-17 years) and their families, I argue that the work experiences and livelihood strategies of young people are inseparable from local political economy, household and communal livelihood strategies, as well as structural problems to do with national development and North-South relations in international trade. The latter not only led young people’s participation in a deeply unequal and exploitative system of unfair trade but also determines the value their work deserves locally. I conclude that conceptualizing young people’s work in ‘glocal spaces’ – situated in local contexts, but increasingly subordinated to the global capitalist system – help us to overcome the artificial analytical separation of global/local by placing them into contexts.