Addressing gender inequality through employment and procurement: Local content in Tanzania\u27s emerging gas industry

Gender is an overlooked area when it comes to local content. Few, if any, local content laws and regulations for the extractive industries globally contain any specific provisions related to gender equity or female empowerment. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, shortening and simplifying supply chains has become an imperative for multinational firms. Formal employment in oil extraction is traditionally male-dominated. In Tanzania, employment in this sector is estimated to be over 80 percent male. However, the negative impacts of the industry, especially in terms of social disruption and dislocation, environmental degradation, and loss of livelihood, are more likely to be felt by women. This paper explores gender dimensions of local participation in the extractive industries, economic empowerment, and provisions mandating and setting targets for women\u27s participation in Tanzania\u27s emerging gas industry. It is argued that the government must pursue a holistic approach to gender equality in legislation, regulation, policy, education and training in order to maximize the benefit from extractive industries and petro-development

State-led industrial development, structural transformation and elite-led plunder: Angola (2002–2013) as a developmental state

From 2002-2013, Angola engaged in large-scale state-led reconstruction and development alongside an elite-led appropriation and seizure of national assets. Until the oil price shock, Angola had been succeeding in promoting rapid economic growth and possibly even significant social development alongside a massive grab of wealth and power by local elites. Today, though an economic crisis has taken hold, frequent predictions of the country’s immanent collapse have yet to be fulfilled. This paper reviews the state’s development planning and expenditure with a focus on public investment and industrial development to determine to what extent Angola during this period might have been considered a developmental or petro-developmental state. It is argued that, while more significant than generally thought, petro-developmental outcomes were and are limited by the autocratic and neopatrimonial tendencies of the Angolan elite. Nevertheless, limited success with structural transformation may have lasting effects. Following its long civil war, the conditions existed for Angola to follow a new path of state-led development. However more difficult it may now be, structural transformation and economic diversification remain the only path to economic and social development

Oil exploration and production in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1990-present: Trends and developments

The exploration and production of oil and gas continue to be vigorously pursued by African states and international corporations—both large and small. However, with unpredictable fluctuations in oil prices it becomes more difficult to exploit these resources in ways which accrue net benefits to both the state and its citizens. The oil and gas industry in Africa continues to grow and attract new investment, especially from China and India. Despite the lower price of oil, exploration and production activities continue to be carried out. At the same time, the possibilities for oil and gas to be a blessing narrow. Natural resource-based development has always been a difficult objective for any state. The question now may be whether embracing oil and gas is socially responsible: as renewable energy becomes more cost-effective and societies transition into a post-carbon world, the prospects for African states to make good use of carbon resources are waning. In exploring the closing window for petro-development in Africa, this paper uses a comparative cross-regional analysis of trends and developments to highlight how weak legal frameworks and a lack of institutional capacity pose major challenges for the continent\u27s states in managing their natural resources

The Reinvention of Elite Accumulation in the Angolan Oil Sector: Emergent capitalism in a rentier economy

The post-war transition in Angola has involved small shifts in strategies of elite accumulation to maintain the status quo and deepen the internal concentration of power and wealth. This paper hypothesizes that Angola is at the beginning of a fundamental political-economic shift – away from the peripheral rentier economy and towards an indigenous system of capitalist accumulation. Recent developments in the oil and oil services sectors such as the push for increased local content, or “Angolanisation”, show that the elite is engaged in a process of reinventing itself. Unfortunately, the tendency of the transition is towards the further entrenchment of the power of the Angolan elite and increasingly unequal distribution of wealth under the emerging social relations of production and accumulation.A transição pós-guerra em Angola envolveu pequenas mudanças nas estratégias de acumulação da elite para manter o status quo e aprofundar a concentração interna de poder e riqueza. Este artigo coloca a hipótese de que Angola está no início de uma mudança político-económica fundamental – da economia rentista periférica para um sistema indígena de acumulação capitalista. Desenvolvimentos recentes no sector petrolífero e no sector da prestação de serviços como a pressão para aumentar o conteúdo local (“angolanização”), mostram que a elite está envolvida num processo de reinvenção de si própria. Infelizmente, a tendência da transição é para um maior entrincheiramento do poder da elite angolana e uma crescente desigualdade na distribuição de riqueza sob as relações sociais emergentes de produção e acumulação

Incommensurable languages of value and petro-geographies: Land-use, decision-making and conflict in South-Western Ghana

Petroleum in Ghana has created new dilemmas for land control and spatial planning. This paper explores petro-geographies using the concept of “incommensurable values” to situate the multiple, conflicting, and intersecting values and framings attached to land. We identify languages of value used by non-state actors that reflect the need for social-market investments, gainful employment, food security, and protection from expropriation and pollution. We find that these languages are incommensurate with those of state actors, who emphasize efficiency, competitiveness, and voluntariness in pursuit of the “highest and best use of land and petroleum resources”. The spatial outcomes reflect a singularization of local incommensurable land values into commensurable spatial forms, creating an enabling environment for private and centralized extractive capital. Rural displacement and urban gentrification have become the costs of speculative “oil city projects” and “petro-industrial hubs”. The central government, state agencies, oil companies, and other stakeholders, have engaged in “value-legitimation” processes reflecting different values, backgrounds, and power positions. These processes delegitimize local conceptions of value in land, creating new contradictions and avenues for conflict. As a result, local knowledge and values are replaced with logics of market deregulation and “efficiency” in a “locking-in” of a new approach to planning and spatial development that will have significant impacts on economies, livelihoods and food security

Local Content in Developing and Middle-Income Countries: Towards a More Holistic Strategy

This paper introduces a collection of manuscripts compiled for a special section of The Extractive Industries and Society on local content. Our introduction paper situates these pieces in the wider literature and policy debates on local content in the extractive industries in developing economies. Local content requirements (LCRs), which seek to create value locally, tend to be driven by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and other agencies that work alongside multinational companies (MNCs), civil society organizations and international institutions in the mining and oil and gas sectors. For states, the establishment of SOEs and other government bodies needed to implement local content is a key to building a robust indigenous technical base for, and developing domestic linkages to, the extractive industries. The article concludes by prescribing recommendations on how to develop LCRs that create public value for a diverse group of stakeholders linked to the extractive industries

Trajectories of large-scale land acquisition dynamics in Angola: Diversity, histories, and implications for the political economy of development in Africa

Numerous large scale land acquisitions have occurred in Angola since partial political and economic liberalization in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and further increased after 2002 and the end of armed conflict. They have occurred in conjunction with the emergence of a range of large state-coordinated agricultural projects, often by foreign contractors, for domestic food, and involving plans for backwards and forwards linkages to agro-processing and manufacturing initiatives. Altogether such land allocations and projects involve several billion dollars and several million hectares. These activities appear to often also involve high-level officials and/or wealthy Angolans and are often interpreted as neo-patrimonialism, state-sanctioned private accumulation, and instances of continuity in extractive institutions. Yet examining specific agrarian transformations illustrates how land and rural poverty in Angola are much more complex than a zero-sum game of elite accumulation of private land concessions. Key are Angola’s geo-historical trajectories of colonialism, war, socialism and liberalization, which the article examines in two concessions in Malanje Province We address the relationships between international enterprises and domestic elites, and the relevance of land dynamics within a long-term political economy perspective on capitalist industrialization and structural transformation in Angola and Africa

The theory and practice of building developmental states in the Global South

Reviewing decades of thinking regarding the role of the state in economic development, we argue for the continued relevance of the concept of the ‘developmental state’. With reference to Argentina, Brazil, Ethiopia, Rwanda and China, we contend that new developmental states are evidence of a move beyond the historical experience of East Asian development. Further, we argue for the applicability of the developmental state framework to key questions of governance, institution building, industrial policy and the extractive industries, as well as to a wide variety of cases of successful and failed state-led development in the early twenty-first century

Studying the developmental state : theory and method in research on industrial policy and state-led development in Africa

This paper examines theoretical and methodological issues in the study of African developmental states. We argue that applying this concept beyond East Asia must take into account changes in the global economic context–in particular systemic tendencies towards deficient consumer demand–to uncover the conditions under which demand for commodity production remains or becomes expansionary. We further argue for a mixed methods case study approach to structural transformation, blending quantitative and qualitative evidence at multiple levels of analysis. The examples of concrete manufacturing and oil and gas in Nigeria and Tanzania illustrate our approach to researching state-led development in Africa

Ghana\u27s petroleum industry: Expectations, frustrations and anger in coastal communities

With much fanfare, Ghana\u27s Jubilee Oil Field was discovered in 2007 and began producing oil in 2010. In the six coastal districts nearest the offshore fields, expectations of oil-backed development have been raised. However, there is growing concern over what locals perceive to be negative impacts of oil and gas production. Based on field research conducted in 2010 and 2015 in the same communities in each district, this paper presents a longitudinal study of the impacts (real and perceived) of oil and gas production in Ghana. With few identifiable benefits beyond corporate social responsibility projects often disconnected from local development priorities, communities are growing angrier at their loss of livelihoods, increased social ills and dispossession from land and ocean. Assuming that others must be benefiting from the petroleum resources being extracted near their communities, there is growing frustration. High expectations, real and perceived grievances, and increasing social fragmentation threaten to lead to conflict and underdevelopment