Crude Ambitions: The Internationalization of Emerging National Oil Companies

The burgeoning literature on the internationalization of emerging country NOCs asserts that the combination of technology transfer in the 1970s-80s and sustained high oil prices in the 1990s created an unprecedented opportunity in the 2000s for NOCs to internationalize their operations at a rapid pace, enabling them to compete successfully with International Oil Companies (IOCs) for dominance in global oil markets. The 2000s has indeed witnessed the expansion of emerging country NOCs' investment, exploration, production, and personnel abroad. And yet, this widespread ambition to internationalize has been realized with varying levels of success. We capture this variation by developing an original composite index that assigns NOCs a degree of internationalization score. We then provide an alternative explanation for why emerging country NOCs achieve such different levels of success. Contrary to existing explanations that emphasize structural and economic changes at the international level, we argue that an NOC's capacity to internationalize is constrained by domestic politics; more specifically, the legacy of its mode of emergence, the timing of convergence between the government and NOC management regarding the merits of internationalization, and the sequencing of sectoral reforms vis-à-vis convergence. Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies.Event Web Page, photo

Central Asia and the globalisation of the contemporary legal consciousness

What is the logic which governs the processes of legal globalization? How does the transnational proliferation of legal forms operate in the contemporary geo-juridical space? What are the main defining characteristics of the currently dominant mode of transnational legal consciousness and how can the concept of legal consciousness help us understand better the historical ebb and flow of the Western-led projects of good governance promotion in regions like Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet Union? Using Duncan Kennedy’s seminal essay Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought as its starting platform, this essay seeks to explore these and a series of other related questions, while also drawing on the work of the Greek Marxist lawyer-philosopher Nicos Poulantzas to help elucidate some latent analytical stress-points in Kennedy’s broader theoretical framework. Reacting against the neo-Orientalist tone adopted across much of the contemporary field of Central Asian studies, it develops an alternative account of the internal history of the legal-globalizational encounter between the Western-based reform entrepreneurs and the national legal-political elites in Central Asia in the post-1991 period, complementing it with a detailed description of the general institutional and discursive structures within which this encounter took place

Prelude To The Resource Curse: Oil And Gas Development Strategies In Central Asia And Beyond

this article is to explain these empirical puzzles and, in doing so, to formulate a broader theory of the initial formation of natural resource development strategies. In short, we argue that state leaders choose energy development strategies based on the domestic constraints they face when they either discover or gain newfound authority over their energy reserves: (1) the availability of alternative sources of rents; and (2) the level of political contestation. These two domestic factors determine the amount of resources that state leaders possess in the status quo versus the costs they must continue to incur in order to satisfy their 4 supporters and pay-off their opponents. Hence, they also determine the extent to which state leaders must rely on energy sector development to retain their power. Where state leaders enjoy a high degree of access to alternative sources of rents and a low level of contestation, they have sufficient resources to reward their supporters and appease or defeat their opponents. Thus, they can afford to nationalize (or retain state ownership) and to minimize international involvement because they can delay the financial benefits accruing from oil and gas exploitation. Where state leaders have a low degree of access to alternative sources of rents and a high level of contestation, they lack sufficient resources to reward their supporters and appease or defeat their opponents. Thus, they privatize their energy sector with the direct involvement of international actors in order to reap the financial benefits from exploiting their precious reserves immediately. The article proceeds as follows. First, we assess the extent to which the existing literature is relevant for explicating our puzzle. Second, both building on and departing from this lite..

Institutions and Policies to Protect Rural Livelihoods in REDD+ Regimes

While there is growing interest among researchers and practitioners concerning the risks that emerging REDD+ regimes pose to rural livelihoods, there has been little scholarly analysis of specific policies that could be applied to guard against these risks. We argue that for REDD+ regimes to avoid negative impacts on local populations, social safeguard policies will need to overcome the significant barriers posed by ambiguous property rights and weak governance and create five institutional conditions: (1) local community support for project-level activities, (2) citizen participation in reforms affecting property rights and land use, (3) transparency of forest carbon revenue flows, (4) citizen access to grievance mechanisms, and (5) opportunities for adaptive management through evaluation. We identify and discuss various policies that could be applied to produce these conditions. We argue that positively engaging rural populations in REDD+ may be integral to the effectiveness of programs in reducing deforestation and degradation, and enhancing forest carbon stores. Future research should aim to identify the causal mechanisms (policies and institutions) responsible for positive socioeconomic and ecological impacts in REDD+, while testing key theories that link participation to conservation and development outcomes. (c) 2010 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Pluralism by Default and the Sources of Political Liberalization in Weak States

this paper, inhibited our understanding of why pluralistic and quasi democratic politics appeared and persisted in so many inhospitable environments such as Africa and the former Soviet Union. This paper focuses on regime trajectories and the challenges of authoritarian state building in Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine, which like many other countries in the developing world suffer from a set of historical and institutional characteristics that would seem to undermine democratic development -- a lack of democratic history, weak civil society, weak rule of law, and relative international isolation. Despite such obstacles, all four countries experienced relatively pluralistic politics at the beginning of the 1990s -- hovering somewhere between democratic and competitive authoritarian (Levitsky and Way 2002a) or hybrid rule. In order to fully understand the development of pluralism in inhospitable environments like the former Soviet Union, we need to broaden our analytic framework beyond an exclusive focus on democratic institution building. Some cases are better understood as failed authoritarian regimes rather than as struggling democracies. In the early 1990s, all four countries experienced varying degrees of pluralism by default, a form of democratic political competition specific to weak states lacking a robustly institutionalized civil society and rule of law. Pluralism by default describes cases in which the proximate source of political competition is less a robust civil society, strong democratic institutions or democratic leadership and much more the inability of incumbents to enforce authoritarian rule. In the former Soviet Union, elite-level disorientation, fragmentation and state weakness created by the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequ..