The Shaping and Changing of Petroleum Resource Governance: Discourses of Natural Gas in Tanzania

Abstract

Contributing to the debates about how and why petroleum resource governance regimes develop and change, this paper explores how competing discourses from different scales influence policy formulation processes and foster change. Discourses frame the problems and dictate the spectre of possible solutions, thus having social consequences in ‘the real world’. Exploring the example of the recent experiences of petroleum resource governance in Tanzania, the analysis shows how discourses of petroleum resource governance adjust in interaction with other aspects of the specific national context in which resource governance occurs. The requirements of good governance found in the literature and international policy initiatives are coupled with a call for industrialisation. The inheritance from Nyerere; the experiences with the mining sector; and a high degree of distrust for foreign companies take the petroleum resource governance in the direction of resource nationalism. Designing an alternative policy agenda, the Tanzanian government has found a room to manoeuvre.

Keywords:

• petroleum resource governance
• discourses
• context
• resource nationalism
• development

Notes on contributor

Hege Bakke Sørreime is a PhD student in Human Geography at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo, working on the project “Extractive Resource Governance and Poverty Alleviation Discourses: Contextualizing Extractive Resource Governance”, funded by the Department of Sociology and Human Geography.

Notes

1 Newer studies also explore the concept of the resource curse at the subnational scale (e.g., Libman, 2013).

2 Counting newspaper articles from The Citizen was challenging, since articles often continue over several pages and headlines are changed. While mistakes could have occurred, I do not consider this as a major weakness for the data construction as the selection of newspaper articles is not systematically skewed in one way or the other.

3 Negative tendencies in 2016 included arrests and charges for criticising Magufuli and the police, as well as closing down two newspapers (Mawio and Mseto) for publishing stories of political tensions on Zanzibar and allegations against Magufuli (Freedom House, 2017).

4 The Ministry of Energy and Minerals (MEM) was split in two October 2017. However, interviews were conducted before this date, and the term MEM is thus used here.

5 The government has accused Acacia Mining Plc of operating illegally and for avoiding taxes (Bloomberg 12 June 2017). Retrieved from: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-12/tanzanian-government-accuses-acacia-of-mining-gold-illegally.