Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Sam Hickey
(University of Manchester)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Economy and Development
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
New discoveries of commercial quantities of oil and gas in Africa in the early C21 have brought both rupture and continuity. We explore this in relation to modes of governance and state capacity, transnational connections, development trajectories and state-society relations.
Long Abstract:
The discovery of commercial quantities of oil and gas in several African countries during the early Twenty First Century was greeted as a rupture that brought with it very mixed blessings. Hopes of a boost to development were countered by fears that a new generation of countries would now undergo the so-called 'resource curse'. Over a decade in, now is a good time to assess how far the discovery of oil and gas has proved to herald a new era and how far such finds have helped to embed continuity at multiple levels, both in terms of development and governance. Is there any evidence of a political resource curse, with new natural resource finds helping to embed undemocratic and patronage-based forms of politics? Have 'democracies' proved more or less capable of governing oil and gas effectively as compared to countries with more 'semi-authoritarian' leaders? What shapes the commitment and capacity of ruling elites to govern oil in the national interest? How have far have oil and gas finds transformed the transnational connections that African countries are entwined in, particularly in terms of the growing involvement of China and the introduction of a new range of commercial players? To what extent have the kinds of institutional arrangements promoted by international actors (e.g. the Norway model) helped or hindered countries in their efforts to govern natural resources effectively? We welcome papers that examine the political economy of natural resource governance in Africa in relation to these and other questions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Using a political settlements approach, this paper finds that Kenya's virulent form of competitive-clientelism is undermining the commitment and capacity of ruling elites to govern the country's newfound oil and gas reserves in the national interest
Paper long abstract:
This paper deploys a political settlements approach to examine whether Kenya's ruling elites are demonstrating commitment and capacity to govern the country's newfound oil and gas reserves in the national interest. Drawing on key informant interviews and documentary evidence, the paper finds that all of the state's key functions within the sector are conditioned - and, indeed, generally undermined - by Kenya's virulent competitive-clientelism, which incentivises short-term and predatory forms of governance and precludes against serious investments in state capacity. The negotiation of production sharing contracts, for example, is motivated less by a desire to further the national interest and more by political and ethnic considerations as well as a desire to secure payoffs for particular individuals and factions. So, too, does Kenya's political settlement compromise the state's ability to monitor and discipline industry players, as the only companies that are sanctioned or have licenses withdrawn are those that are unable to maintain their connections to ruling elites within Kenya's highly-fluid political context. Finally, the paper finds that the state's ability to undertake complex negotiations with oil companies on commercial terms for projects that are entering the development stage is also being severely hampered by the country's political settlement, as ruling coalitions in Kenya suffer from high degrees of ethnic fragmentation. Ministries and agencies are the fiefdoms of particular ethnic factions and there is a lack of cooperation between them, resulting in an environment in which it is difficult to coordinate around large-scale projects such as oil.
Paper short abstract:
Prior to adopting 'best-practice' reforms, Uganda was praised for adopting a technocratic approach and driving tough deals with IOCs. A political settlements analysis is deployed to assess whether the reforms have undermined or enhanced Uganda's capacity to govern oil in the national interest.
Paper long abstract:
Despite having failed to move to production after discovering oil in commercial quantities in 2006, Uganda is lauded for adopting a rules-based approach to oil governance, particular for in terms of getting good deals from IOCs. This capacity to negotiate effectively was directly shaped by the support and autonomy that President Museveni had offered to oil technocrats, in line with an apparent long-term commitment to governing the sector in the national interest. However, the oil sector in Uganda has undergone significant institutional reform over the past three years to ensure that the policy, regulatory and commercial dimensions of the sector are handled separately. This paper explores whether best-practice institutional reforms make sense within a country like Uganda, particularly given the changing nature of its political settlement dynamics in recent years. We argue that the interaction of these reforms with the increasingly vulnerable nature of the ruling coalition in Uganda has led oil governance to become more fragmented and personalized. We show how this has directly affected Uganda's capacity to make good deals with international investors through a detailed case-study of the refinery project, an initiative that is central to Uganda's resource nationalist vision. This controversial case also reveals how both Uganda's oil assemblage and its political settlement are closely entwined in a changing geopolitical context, which in this case involved the playing out of a proxy version of the current 'economic war' between China and the United States.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper we argue that Mozambique has seen a profound reform process separating the commercial and regulatory functions of key institutions in the gas sector. Reforms since the early 1980s have been driven by the need to provide the necessary regulatory frameworks to support major investments.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, we argue that Mozambique has seen a profound reform process separating the commercial and regulatory functions of key institutions in the gas sector. Reforms since the early 1980s have been driven by the need to provide the necessary regulatory frameworks to support major investments. These reforms have generally been supported by international donors and financial institutions. A key feature of the reform process has been the ability of the dominant ruling elite to use these reforms to reproduce its power and use the gas sector for purposes of its own accumulation. This has happened through the control over access to and the sale of natural gas to the domestic market and most importantly to energy generation, with participation by party-owned companies. We argue that, while the regulatory and commercial aspects of the gas sector have been separated over time, with some core expertise being established in what resemble Pockets of Efficiency (PoEs) in the National petroleum Institute (INP) and the Tax Authorities (TA), the dominant ruling elites in and around the executive have used this expertise to ensure that rents from the gas industry can be extracted, despite the extent of the reforms.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the effect of expectations and politics on institutional capacity. Following major gas discoveries Tanzania engaged in reforms aimed at preventing a resource curse. However, the concurrent politization of the sector reduced capacity and slowed down the development of the sector.
Paper long abstract:
Based on in-depth empirical research into the development of Tanzania's petroleum sector this paper analyses the effect of expectations and domestic politics related to a natural gas resource boom on institutional capacity. In the petroleum literature an emerging body of literature points to the role of expectations of resource booms in shaping policy decisions. This has led to diagnoses of the 'resource curse without natural resources' and the 'pre-source curse' in 'new oil' countries, pointing to the detrimental effect of rising expectations on macroeconomic management, governance and corruption, and political stability. Less is known about their effect on capacity. Drawing on a political settlement approach the paper aims at unpacking the reform process in mainland Tanzania in the wake of major gas discoveries. The paper suggests that it is domestic politics more than expectations per se that is the major factor influencing capacity. Informed by international best practice, the country engaged in major legal and institutional reforms aimed at preventing the emergence of a resource curse. This led to the establishment of a number of new institutions that should improve transparency and accountability. However, at the same time the sector was increasingly politisised and this undermined the trust in leaders and existing petroleum institutions and reduced their autonomy and capacity. This impeded the national oil company, TPDC's, development into a pocket of efficiency and slowed down the development of the country's petroleum sector.
Paper short abstract:
The paper addresses the rather limited impact of oil exploitation in Ghana and links this to the role of coalitions around the two major parties.
Paper long abstract:
Ghana's status as a new oil producer raises questions about the developmental effects of resources, and the role of political institutions in these processes. The conundrum this paper addresses is the rather limited impact of oil exploitation in Ghana despite the country's strong democratic record and internationally acclaimed oil governance legislation. The reasons for this lie in the nature of elite-based political coalitions and we root our analysis of Ghana's hydrocarbons in the political settlements literature, which moves us beyond the 'good governance' approaches so often linked to 'resource curse' thinking. We also move beyond the instrumentalism of political settlements theory to examine the role political ideas play in shaping resource governance. We argue that inter-coalitional rivalry has generally undermined the benefits of Ghana's oil but that a crude interests-based interpretation is insufficient to explain differences between these coalitions.
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation we analyze the political economy of Niger Delta oil governance paying particular attention to the transnational connections that have historically shaped the practices and narratives of different actors as local social movements and the Nigerian state.
Paper long abstract:
To Nigeria the discovery of oil at the end of the 1950s brought ruptures and continuities on economic, social and political orders. Since then a myriad of actors have tried to capture the oil wealth generated in the Niger Delta region developing complex and apparently contradictory practices. Those actors have created a fluid network of alliances, the so-called "Nigerian oil complex" (Watts, 2004). Faced with dominant approaches, which tend to emphasize a single dimension of natural resources-related conflicts in Africa, in this presentation we analyze the political economy of Niger Delta oil governance paying special attention to the transnational connections established around the oil industry. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews conducted in Abuja and London to activists and NGO members our research explores how the populations affected by oil extraction are becoming increasingly involved in the transnational oil industry in ambivalent ways. We will show that the exploitation of oil has contributed to generate both alliances and fragmentations among the local population and has encouraged the flowering of new competing identities for access to resources (Obi, 2001). We will finally note that since 1999 the democratization process gave more strength to this competition and opened up new challenges to the Nigerian state on development and governance issues. This presentation will confirm the importance of spatial and temporal dimensions in analyzing natural resources-related conflicts while emphasizing the crucial role played by the transnational connections that shape the practices and narratives of local actors in oil rich regions.