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.