Between elite reflexes and deliberative impulses: oil and the landscape of contentious politics in Ghana

Abstract

From the vested interests that have held back the promulgation of Nigeria's Petroleum Industry for more than seventeen years, to the sporadic stoppages that often frustrate attempts by the Kenyan government and Tullow Oil to truck oil from the Turkana region, attempts by national political elites to construct grand schemes from petroleum resources often get entangled in a complex of contentious politics. Nonetheless, the basic instinct of the predominant literature on oil governance has been to confine these contentious processes to the 'black box' of elite consolidation. Based on an in-depth account of the distinctive political economy drivers of reform in Ghana's oil industry and the complement of Abdul Raufu Mustapha's interpretation of the 'multiple publics' governing Africa's public sphere, this article offers a pushback against this dominant disposition. The article underscores the need to frame the analytic problem of reform in the oil industry as part of a more fundamental question; should the politics of oil in developing countries be viewed through the narrow prism of the rational calculations of dominant elites, instead of the broader impulses of democratic pluralism and contentious politics at multiple scales? The main argument advanced by the author maintains that the constitutive processes that drive institutional and policy reform in the oil industry reflect the impulses of contentious politics, instead of elite reflexes.

Developmental Constitutionalism and the Fourth Branch: Ghana’s Independent Constitutional Bodies and the Redress of Poverty and Inequality

“…Alert to the 'resource curse' and inspired by programmes in Norway, a Fundamental Policy and Master Plan was adopted in July 2008 in Ghana to manage oil revenues, envisaging legislative oversight, although with limited citizen input. 120 By 2011, a statutory Public Interest and Accountability Committee ('PIAC') was established to 'ensure transparency and accountability in the management and use of petroleum revenue and investments'. 121 Participatory surveys had revealed an overwhelming call for a 'separate oversight mechanism, independent of Parliament, with full access to all information regarding the use and management of oil revenues'.…”

How global norms matter: norm diffusion and the tangled web of localization in Ghana’s extractive industry

“…To further explore the complex social agency that underpins norm diffusion in local settings, our analysis extends Weiss' (1995) conceptualization in two ways. First, it combines the approach of governed interdependence with the lens of contentious politics, conceived here as the diversity of conflicts and disputations that shape the outcomes of institutions (Leitner et al, 2008;Slater, 2010;Oppong, 2020a). As demonstrated further below, this approach enables us to underscore how institutional variations and governance outcomes over space and time reflect contestations, deliberations and the proliferation of ideas that drive reform across different states.…”

“…Ghana's commercial oil find in the offshore Cape Three Points of the Western Region which was announced in 2007 has provoked different scholarly interests around various reform instruments that the country has deployed to secure optimum oil-led development (Oppong, 2016;Phillips, Hailwood, & Brooks, 2016;Prempeh & Kroon, 2012). While some notable exceptions exist (Mohan et al, 2017;Oppong, 2020a), the account from this literature has largely portrayed the governance landscape of the industry as the site where external technocratic blueprints tend to hold sway. More specifically, Phillips et.…”

“…Others who strike a less optimistic tone have identified various gaps, such as the institutional paralysis of the Ghanaian state and the 'resource curse' effects, that have undermined the effective intrusion of global norms in the industry (Akonnor & Ohemeng, 2020;Quartey & Abbey, 2020). An ensuing question that remains largely underexplored relates to the institutional and social agency of governance reforms in the oil industry (Oppong, 2020a;Shivji, 2008). The primary objective of this paper is, therefore, to challenge the persistent fallacy of global norm diffusion by pointing to localized dynamics that facilitate a richer undersanding of the diffusion process.…”