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Paper short abstract:

This study explores the relationship between "public authorities" and livelihoods in an oil-bearing community. Ethnographic fieldwork in Gamba, Gabon shows that urbanization, a by-product of local oil exploitation, can displace lineage solidarities while contributing to material stagnation.

Paper long abstract:

This study uses political economy and ethnography to explain local political dynamics in the Département de Ndougou, Gabon, home of the gigantic Rabi-Kounga oilfield. As spatial and temporal contexts marked by intense forms of monetization, oil-bearing communities within oil-dependent states provide a unique opportunity to investigate the evolution of local, business, and state interactions.

Since the discovery of Rabi-Kounga in 1985 by Royal Dutch Shell, the Département de Ndougou has contributed to roughly half of Gabon's government revenue. Using ethnographic fieldwork, government and NGO data, the paper begins by tracing a diachronic history of the Ndougou's local institutions from the pre-extractive era (1950s) through the summer of 2015, when the author had occasion to conduct fieldwork. The study then proceeds with a brief analysis of competing institutions vying for authority in a contested space, as well as their effects on the evolving spiritual and material well-beings of the Ndougou's inhabitants. Taken into account are not only electoral and ministerial institutions, but also Shell-Gabon's initiatives, administrative chiefs, chefs de terre, first-comer clan lineages, NGOs, religious institutions, and grassroots associations.

The paper argues that rather than instigate violent contestation and prebendalism, the local oil industry in Gamba engendered familiar processes of urbanization and rural exodus. Monetization gradually displaced clan solidarity, customary land tenure, and agricultural practices in the Ndougou, as chiefs and other notables sought private employment or public work in Gamba's ineffective, and largely absent, state apparatus. Furthermore, employment, jealousy, and witchcraft undermined a communal spirit and associative life, leading to material stagnation.