Nelson Oppong

The University of Edinburgh | UoE · Centre for African Studies (CAS)

Nations across Africa have launched an array of policy initiatives that aim to position mining as an engine for job creation and inclusive development, echoing earlier post-independence programs to claim sovereignty over natural resources. The reforms include requirements for mining companies to provide local employment and development support, as...

While the origins of Africa's mixed record of oil-led transformation continue to attract attention from disciplines ranging from geography to international relations, there is surprisingly less enthusiasm in their linkages with the colonial experience. This chapter offers an account of how the colonial encounter shaped the trajectory of oil and dev...

A critical scholarship within the International Relations and Comparative Politics scholarship continues to challenge the conventional view that upheld the extractive sector in developing countries as the space where global technocratic norms take root irrespective of socio-economic bargains and contestations. Through an in-depth account of the pol...

Analysis of political settlements has emerged from the shadows of new institutionalism and moved to the epicentre of political economy analysis across Africa. This debate takes on the framework by scrutinising its applicability to the politics of oil through the combined lens of critical political economy and contentious politics. It argues that co...

From the vested interests that have held back the promulgation of Nigeria's petroleum industry for more than 17 years, to the sporadic stoppages that often frustrate attempts by the Kenyan government and Tullow Oil to truck oil from the Turkana region; grand schemes for petroleum resources often get entangled in a complex web of contentious politic...

This paper introduces a special issue titled ‘Governing African Oil and Gas: Boom-Era Political and Institutional Innovation’. The special issue comprises 11 papers which investigate political and institutional innovation during the continent's 2004–2014 boom period. This is explored across state and non-state actors and in the local, national and...

Implicit in the predominant dogma that upholds transparency as the panacea for the ill-effects of resource endowment is a belief that public disclosure undermines the predatory landscape for elite patronage and clientelistic politics. Nonetheless, there is surprisingly little empirical information about how reforms geared towards promoting transpar...

This paper introduces a special issue titled ‘Governing African Oil and Gas: Boom-Era Political and Institutional Innovation’. The special issue comprises 11 papers which investigate political and institutional innovation during the continent's 2004–2014 boom period. This is explored across state and non-state actors and in the local, national and...

The past decade has witnessed a phenomenal upswing in the number of legislative and policy instruments seeking to promote local content, especially within resource-rich countries where governments have imposed quotas for local employment, procurement and value creation on foreign extractive firms. Jesse Ovadia’s The Petro-Developmental State in Afr...

Transparency has been upheld by the dominant Zeitgeist of the twenty-first century as an all-purpose recipe for addressing the ills associated with resource-led developmental transformation. However, little attention has been paid to the bargains and contestations accompanying its institutionalisation in resource-rich countries. To gain a fuller un...

The centrepiece of this paper is Ghana’s Public Interest and Accountability Committee with empirical details of its politics of institutional choice and outcomes. The Committee is hailed as a model of ‘bottom-up’ reform and one of the principal reasons why Ghana is likely to circumvent a ‘resource curse’ situation associated with its petroleum reso...

The question of institutional reform in small island developing states (SIDS) has so far attracted two general perspectives. The predominant approach prescribes neo-Weberian principles such as de-politicisation, neutrality, ‘professionalism', continuity and anonymity, and rational-bureaucratic structures. Critics highlight contextual specificities...