Paper short abstract:

The extractives industry involves an intricate network of organisations and actors with diverse objectives for whom the sector present opportunities, progress or exploitation. This paper will explore the relationship between heterogeneous entities in Kenya's new oil sector and their motivations.

Paper long abstract:

When Kenya discovered oil in 2012, the "resource curse" emerged as a dominant national discourse. Concerns as to whether Kenya will end up like Nigeria where oil has stimulated more conflict and poverty than prosperity were at heart of many debates. What this means is that the responsibility for the success or failure of the budding sector was placed at the feet of the triad i.e. the state, oil companies and community organisations or NGOs based on the assumption that each of these entities have different moral economies that influence their activities and outcomes.

This paper aims to explore the symbiotic relationship between actors and organisations involved in resource extraction processes and their motivations. Based on 13 months ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya's Turkana County, the hub of oil exploration, the paper will go beyond institutional operations and strategies within existing structures of resource extraction to the materialities that continue to influence and substantiate the interests of organisations and actors, positively and otherwise.

In Turkana for instance, many of those that live around the oil wells personify state institutions and private companies and do not consider these institutions as abstract entities. For them, the state is neither an invisible regulator nor the company an ideational body but a group of actors driven by specific interests that compliment and contradict with the people they represent.

The relevance of this paper can be situated within anthropological perspectives on development, natural resource extraction and global processes.