Assistent/inn/en-Kleinprojekt 2025: "Confrontation or Cooperation? Comparing Civil Society Organizations Strategies for Labor Governance in Ethiopia’s Garment Industry in the Context of Global Value Chains"

Despite growing scholarly recognition of labor governance deficits in global value chains (GVCs) and the
emergence of complex, multi-layered governance models (Anner, 2021; Gereffi & Lee, 2016), significant
theoretical and empirical gaps persist. While the literature acknowledges the shift from state-centric
regulation to multi-stakeholder initiatives—particularly those involving civil society organizations
(CSOs)—as a response to persistent labor exploitation (Dahan et al., 2021), it often falls short in
explaining the relative effectiveness and sustainability of divergent non-state strategies in contexts marked
by severe institutional fragility, such as Ethiopia’s garment sector.
To address this gap, study study undertakes a comparative analysis of two contrasting CSO interventions
within Hawassa Industrial Park, one of Ethiopia’s largest and most prominent textile and garment hubs.
Specifically, it examines the efficacy of adversarial, rights-based advocacy led by the Association for
Human Rights in Ethiopia (AHRE), which employs strategies such as public exposure, legal mobilization,
and “naming and shaming,” alongside the collaborative, programmatic approach of the ILO’s SIRAYE
project, which emphasizes capacity building, social dialogue, and institutional partnership (AHRE, 2023;
ILO, 2024). By empirically assessing the outcomes of these two models in addressing chronic labor
abuses such as low wages, gender-based violence, and forced overtime, this study contributes to the labor
governance and labor regime literatures within GVC/GPN scholarship. It aims to develop a contingency
framework for understanding CSO effectiveness, identifying the conditions under which confrontational
strategies may outperform collaborative approaches, or vice versa, in contexts of limited state capacity.