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Contribution short abstract:

As an historian of the international oil industry and the environment, I have studied the plans of oilman and environmental diplomat Maurice Strong to develop Third World oil resources, which reveal a tension between the positive and negative development narratives.

Contribution long abstract:

In July 1979, Maurice Strong, a Canadian oil and minerals businessman who had started a second career in UN environmental and development politics, created the International Energy Development Corporation (IEDC). Recognizing the severe economic repercussions of the 1979 oil shock for oil-importing countries in the developing world, the Geneva-based IEDC was intended to facilitate oil exploration to turn these countries with negative oil trade balances into oil producers. To implement his vision of finding oil for the developing world – all while abiding by the highest environmental standards and winning the trust of host governments with fair investment procedures – Strong recruited a highly respected and experienced management team and gained major corporate invostors for exploration projects in Congo, Egypt, Sudan, Ghana, Angola, Tanzania and Turkey. Strong’s own company and his partners, however, ran into financial difficulties before the explored resources could be exploited for the benefit of the host countries. The IEDC was acquired by the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation in 1983, which ended up developing part of the explored fields, but nowhere near what Strong had envisioned for the developing world. The case of the IEDC represents a unique and understudied case of North-South energy and development cooperation and reveals the ambiguity in the actions and rhetoric of Maurice Strong, who propagated sustainable growth and development, which in his eyes included developing Third World oil fields.