Oil sector reform in Africa : the case of Nigeria

African governments commonly manage their oil wealth in ways that generate negative political and economic outcomes, and the existing literature contains convincing explanations for this trend. Yet this scholarship does not explain the instances of oil sector reform in the continent’s eight leading producers – Angola, Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria and Sudan. These limited but significant efforts appear contradictory to the incentive environment assumed to prevail in these states. Furthermore, the type of reform and the level of its success vary from country to country despite some presupposed similarities. This dissertation seeks to explain both the unexpected presence and uneven-ness of oil sector reform in Africa’s oil producing states. The dissertation looks at a single country, Nigeria, and traces reform efforts in four different areas of oil sector policy in order to identify possible explanations for reform. This research led to the identification of four observations about the initiation and implementation of oil sector reform in Africa; these constitute the dissertation’s principal findings. Comparative analysis then indicates that these findings can be generalised across oil rich Africa, and that they also explain the variation exhibited in the region’s oil sector reform records. The findings argue that oil creates a structural environment in which leaders possess a “privileged agency”. This affords them an exclusive capacity to select and advance reform. Leaders choose to initiate reform for different motives, each of which contains distinct international content. “Stunted reform”, or the uneven or incomplete implementation of reform, often ensures due largely to the leader’s tendency to abandon or subvert reform so as to protect their discretionary control over channels of distribution. These tendencies increase during periods of political contestation or when leaders face short horizons. Finally, even stunted oil sector reform appears to improve the country’s governance environment.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo