Paper short abstract:

Recently oil has been discovered in Uganda’s Albertine Rift Valley. This paper contrasts interventions designed to promote social change within the oil region by rights-based NGOs and the oil company Tullow Oil. Particular attention is given to how each group constructs ”local communitie” as objects of discourse and intervention.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on fieldwork in Western Uganda's Bunyoro Kingdom in 2011. Here significant oil reserves were recently confirmed and are now being exploited by the UK-based company Tullow Oil plc. Oil has brought massive attention to the region, creating a strongly politicised field. This paper contrasts the actions and discourses of rights-based NGO and civil society actors and Tullow Oil. "Local communities" are constructed in the discourses and interventions of both the civil society groups and Tullow Oil's Corporate Social Responsibility programs, as each positions itself within a wider Ugandan and international political and economic arena.

This paper offers a critical examination of these discourses. It starts with a review of the social realities of fishing communities living along the shores of Lake Albert, who are directly affected by the current oil explorations. I argue that neither civil society nor Tullow fully addresses the complexity of life below "the escarpment." Here, in the Albertine Rift Valley, life has long been shaped by the exigencies of a fishing industry on a relatively remote lake, which is also a fraught international boundary. Village populations are diverse, mobile, flexible and characterised by a high degree of adaptivity. These are localized communities but they are not the simple 'local communities' constructed by civil society and Tullow.

With point of departure in local imaginings of present and future possibilities in an emerging oil economy, this paper will conclude with a critical discussion of the role of "stakeholder engagement".