ABSTRACT

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 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 narrative. It argues that the constitutive processes that drive institutional and policy reform reflect the impulses of contentious politics, instead of elite reflexes.

摘要

从阻碍尼日利亚石油工业颁布超过17年的既得利益，到零星的停工，这些停工常常使肯尼亚政府和塔洛石油公司（Tullow Oil）试图从图尔卡纳地区运油的努力受到挫败；石油资源的宏伟计划常常纠缠在一个复杂的有争议的政治网络中。尽管如此，有关石油治理的主要文献的基本本能是将这些有争议的过程局限于精英合并的“黑匣子”。基于对加纳石油业改革的独特政治经济驱动因素的深入了解，以及对阿卜杜勒·劳夫·穆斯塔法（Abdul Raufu Mustapha）对控制非洲公共领域的“多个公众”的解释的补充，本文对这一占主导地位的叙述提出了反对意见。