Restoration policies and the ‘travelling model’ of the Great Green Wall in Ethiopia's Tigray region

The Great Green Wall (GGW) initiative was launched in 2007 as a Pan-African initiative to plant a belt of trees stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. The project aims to restore 100 million hectares of land and create 10 million jobs by 2030. However, implementation is far behind schedule due to political instability, delayed funding, fragmented governance, and other challenges. This paper examines the politics of GGW implementation in Ethiopia, focusing on how the initiative's original “green belt” vision has evolved in practice. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in the Tigray region in 2024 and 2025, we analyse how the GGW vision has been translated into locally specific forms of landscape restoration. While Ethiopia's long history of community-based land management provides favourable conditions for the initiative, the recent war and budgetary issues have severely impacted its implementation. Using the concept of “travelling models”, we demonstrate that, in practice, the GGW initiative is not a coherent policy package, but rather the product of multiple, locally adapted modifications. This includes the rebranding of other existing land management projects as GGW activities to meet donor expectations and transforming the original green vision into a patchwork of restoration projects. Tigray's experience exemplifies how global environmental models are adapted, challenged, and reimagined at the local level.