The discovery of commercial quantities of oil and gas resources in the Gulf of Guinea and parts of East Africa has once again raised expectations that sustained development will emerge in one of the world’s poorest regions. At the same time there is great concern that Africa’s new resource-rich countries will succumb to the so-called resource curse phenomenon because of their generally weak governance institutions. In response to this challenge, the international community has intensified its efforts to promote good governance mechanisms in such countries, focused on transparency and accountability, and informed by a dominant institutionalist literature which argues that the differences in resource governance outcomes can be explained by the differences in institutional design and performance. A recent turn to politics in both the development and resource curse literature has begun to move the research agenda beyond the primacy of institutions to look at the politics that underpin the emergence and performance of institutions. This is particularly evidenced in the emerging literature on political settlements that emphasise the distribution of power amongst social groups in society and how these power relations shape institutions and in turn development outcomes. This new political lens is helping to deepen analysis of how and why resource-rich countries prevent or succumb to the resource curse and provides an opportunity to interrogate the inclusive development prospects of Africa’s new oil-rich countries. In this thesis, I apply and extend the political settlement approaches by incorporating ideational and spatial dynamics, to analyse the prospect of inclusive development outcomes in Ghana where oil and gas resources were discovered in 2007. Focusing on the power relations between and amongst national elites and elites in the oil producing Western Region, I interrogate the ways in which the spatial dynamics of Ghana’s prevailing competitive clientelist political settlement is shaping the governance of the oil sector, and the implications it has for inclusive development. I find that at the onset of a resource boom, the dynamics of local politics, and the dominant incentives and ideas generated by the political settlement has strongly shaped the content and enforcement of Ghana’s foundation institutions to manage the oil sector, in ways that reinforces the pre-oil settlement around the governance of natural resources and undermines the long-term prospects for inclusive development. At the same time, the oil boom has also been accompanied by the increased use of formal institutions and suggests that Ghana may be moving away from personalised to more programmatic forms of clientelism.

This thesis explores the politics of elite commitment to promote local content and participation within Ghana's oil and gas sector. Since Ghana discovered commercial quantities of oil in 2007, debates over whether it would avoid the 'resource curse' have primarily taken place within a neo-institutionalist frame of analysis that emphasises the importance of establishing certain types of institutional arrangements which can help constrain and shape elite commitment to developing petroleum resources in the national interest. This thesis seeks to go beyond this framing by deploying new forms of political analysis which show that elite commitment is shaped not by institutions but by the wider configuration of power. It employs an extended 'political settlements' framework (incorporating ideas) that explains how elite interests and ideas shape developmental forms of political commitment to governing oil in the national interest. The analysis is based on three main cases - the politics of formulating and adopting local content legislation, the process through which this legislation was implemented and the effort put into building the capacity of Ghanaian firms to participate in the sector. The thesis argues that the underlying tendencies within Ghana's competitive clientelist political settlement (electoral incentives, coalition building, patronage politics and ideas) directly shaped the levels of political commitment to secure greater oil rents. Ghana's competitive political settlement generated incentives for politicians to use local content policy promises as a strategy to bring certain civil society and private sector elites within what would become a ruling coalition. This move, along with the resource nationalist ideology of the coalition in power at the time, in turn helped to generate relatively high levels of elite commitment to developing ambitious targets within the legislation. However, the process of implementation has been shaped more directly by incentives than ideas, particularly in terms of pressures to distribute participation opportunities in line with the clientelist logic of the political settlement, benefitting politically connected firms. In applying an extended political settlements approach, this thesis offers deeper political economy insights into the drivers of elite commitment to governing oil in the national interest, and shows how Ghana's efforts to avoid the resource curse have and will continue to be closely shaped by 'power relations', 'elite bargaining' and 'ideas'.

This research investigates the shifting political settlements between the Ugandan state and the Bunyoro and Buganda kingdoms after the discovery of oil between 2007 and 2018. It seeks to answer the following questions using a historically, theoretically, and empirically grounded investigation: What accounts for the Bunyoro kingdom’s failure to benefit substantially from the discovery of oil on its territory? What lessons can be learnt from the Buganda kingdom’s relative success in negotiating with the central government and developing its own political and economic capacity independently of the state? The Bunyoro kingdom, located in the oil-rich Albertine Graben region of western Uganda, has failed to access significant economic benefits from the country’s emerging oil sector despite its historical ownership of the land on which the resource is found. This dissertation combines political settlements theory and the concept of extraversion to explain this empirical puzzle. It finds that the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM)’s imposition of an exclusive political settlement in Uganda, coupled with the Bunyoro kingdom’s limited holding power, accounts for the kingdom’s failure to derive financial benefits from the oil sector. The relative marginalisation of the Bunyoro from Uganda’s oil sector results from the NRM’s historical strategy of limiting the power of sub-state groups who are subsequently excluded from the governing coalition. The main beneficiaries of the oil industry in Uganda are political elites within the ruling NRM coalition and their close associates. The Buganda kingdom serves as a control case study and reveals the potential strategies and structural changes the Bunyoro kingdom could pursue to potentially bypass Uganda’s exclusive settlement and therefore benefit from the country’s nascent oil sector. This dissertation also engages with broader debates on the struggles between the state and traditional kingdoms since independence in sub-Saharan Africa and how this intersects with the politics of natural resource governance. Since the inception of the modern state in the colonial era, kingdoms have engaged in a complex and dialogic relationship of indifference, cooperation, and contention with successive governing regimes. Some of the kingdoms challenged and resisted, albeit unsuccessfully the colonial imposition of a central state primarily because it led to their loss of political and economic power. Ultimately, the state and the kingdoms represent dual forms of nationality forced to co-exist in the post-colonial era, and this produces a complex mix of cooperation, contestation and strategic coexistence. The management and exploitation of natural resources, including oil, is embedded in this political context, and is often associated with adverse outcomes, such as rent-seeking, authoritarian governance, and sectarian violence. Some of these dynamics have accompanied the emergence of Uganda’s new oil industry, with political contestation occurring between the state and the Bunyoro kingdom which has unsuccessfully attempted to capture a share of oil revenue.

As Africa's largest economy and its most populous country, over a decade of rapid economic growth in Nigeria contributed to the 'Africa Rising' narrative. However, like many African commodity exporters, this economic growth, billions of dollars in oil earnings and electoral democracy have not translated into a diversified and industrial economy. This study examines why the Nigerian economy remains so dependent on oil and is non-industrial, which I argue are economic and development outcomes of specific policy choices constrained by Nigeria's institutional configuration or the political settlement. In this endeavour, my central preoccupation is with the political processes of decision making which at any point in time favour one policy choice over the other in resource-rich and plural societies such as Nigeria, and the economic and development outcomes of these policy choices. I employ the political settlements analytical framework to unveil these political processes and the conditions they create in which certain policies are preferred over others. This entails an examination of the causal relationship within the three variables of 'constraints', 'policies' and 'economic and development outcomes'. I argue that understanding Nigeria's challenges of economic diversification requires an examination of its political settlement to identify horizontal (elite competition), vertical (societal agitations for resource redistribution) and external (oil shocks) constraints on a ruling coalition, and the specific economic policy responses each constraint generates. Essentially, my research explains how policy makers are constrained to pursue certain courses of action over others, and the outcomes of these policies on economic growth and the structural transformation of production, exports and government revenue. In the Nigerian context, the study also examines how sub-national and regional differentiation in the distribution of growth in states like Lagos and Kano affect future political processes and their policy outcomes. The thesis draws from multiple data sources, including economic data, semi-structured interviews with various stakeholders, documentary sources, and participant and non-participant observation.