Life in the Time of Oil

Lori Leonard

Description

Life in the Time of Oil examines the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project—a partnership between global oil companies, the World Bank, and the Chadian government that was an ambitious scheme to reduce poverty in one of the poorest countries on the African continent. Key to the project was the development of a marginal set of oilfields that had only recently attracted the interest of global oil companies who were pressed to expand operations in the context of declining reserves. Drawing on more than a decade of work in Chad, Lori Leonard shows how environmental standards, grievance mechanisms, community consultation sessions, and other model policies smoothed the way for oil production, but ultimately contributed to the unraveling of the project. Leonard offers a nuanced account of the effects of the project on everyday life and the local ecology of the oilfield region as she explores the resulting tangle of ethics, expectations, and effects of oil as development.

Acknowledgments
1. An Experiment in Development
2. Dead Letters
3. Becoming 'Eligible'
4. Ties that Bind
5. In the Midst of Things
6. Footprints
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• African Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology
• Development studies
• General officer
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 04 avril 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253019875
• Langue: English

Extrait

LIFE IN THE TIME OF OIL
LIFE IN THE TIME OF OIL
A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad
LORI LEONARD
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2016 by Lori Leonard
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-01980-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-01983-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-01987-5 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19 18 17 16
For Lo c and Ulrich, les toiles brillantes
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1. An Experiment in Development
2. Dead Letters
3. Becoming Eligible
4. Ties That Bind
5. In the Midst of Things
6. Footprints
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was a very long time in the making, and I have incurred many debts along the way.
The extensive fieldwork that went into this book would not have been possible without the support of the National Science Foundation and its Human and Social Dynamics Program (BCS-0527280). Support for the project was also provided by the Law and Social Sciences program at the NSF (SES-0721712), the New Century Scholars program of the J. William Fulbright Foundation, the Health, Environment, and Economic Development ( HEED ) program of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health (R21 TW006518-01), the Population Center and the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars ( WWICS ), where I began writing this book during a yearlong residential fellowship in an environment that was nothing short of a dream. I am grateful to these institutions for their support and especially for their recognition of the value of extended ethnographic fieldwork. I am also grateful to the people within these institutions who I know-or at least suspect-championed this project. They include Thomas Baerwald at the NSF , Rachel Nugent at the NIH , Andy Cherlin at the Hopkins Population Center, and Steve McDonald and Michael Van Dusen at the WWICS .
The chapters in this book have benefited from the feedback of careful readers and generous critics. My thanks go especially to Omolade Adunbi and Daniel Jordan Smith, who reviewed the book manuscript for Indiana University Press, and to the members of the Africa Seminar at Johns Hopkins-a remarkable Friday afternoon gathering organized by Sara Berry and Pier Larson that is a model for what an academic seminar should be. Some of the regulars at the seminar who saw early drafts of these chapters and pushed me to reshape them include Sara Berry, Thomas Cousins, Julia Cummiskey, Joshua Garoon, Siba Grovogui, Anatoli Ignatov, Jacqui Ignatova, Isaac Kamola, Pier Larson, Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, Randy Packard, Lindsey Reynolds, and Alice Wiemers. I also presented early versions of chapters at the Population Studies and Training Center seminar at Brown University, where the comments of Saida Hodzic, now a colleague at Cornell, Daniel Jordan Smith, and Nick Townsend were particularly helpful, and at seminars organized by the Institute for African Development at Cornell University, the Institute for African Studies at Emory University, and the African Studies Program at Indiana University, which were occasions to receive helpful feedback from Africanists and to meet Dee Mortensen, my editor at IUP , who has been supportive from the start. I am grateful to Muna Ndulo at Cornell, Clifford Crais at Emory, and Maria Grosz-Ngat at Indiana for those invitations. Presentations at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University and the Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health at Georgia Southern University, and the interventions of J. Paul Martin, Alison Scott, and their students, sharpened my thinking about the health and human rights dimensions of the project.
I was at John Hopkins University while doing the fieldwork for this project, and I am indebted to colleagues and students at Hopkins whose work and support for this project helped to shape it in big and small ways. Early on I worked with Veena Das, Ranendra Kumar Das, and Todd Meyers in the Department of Anthropology on a comparative project that helped solidify the methods I used in conducting household surveys, which were an important starting point for the fieldwork I eventually undertook. A number of students accompanied me to the field or worked on the project from Baltimore, including Sima Berendes, Claire Breedlove, Joshua Garoon, Maura Lillis, Leah Maniero, Lindsey Reynolds, Beth Rubenstein, and Jamie Saltsman, as well as Stephen Wissow from Reed College. The brightest light in my time at Hopkins was an extraordinary cohort of doctoral students who lived through the Chad project and whose creativity, care, and friendship prolonged my stay at Hopkins and made it a productive place to be. They include Alison Scott, Joshua Garoon, Emma Tsui, Kate Muessig, Will Dyckman, Lindsey Reynolds, Stephanie Farquhar, Morgan Philbin, and Amelia Buttress.
This project had several rocky starts in Chad that taught me firsthand about oil rents, the Chadian legal system, and the high-stakes business of doing research on a model pipeline project. I am grateful to Daugla Doumagoum Moto and the Centre de Support en Sant International in N Djamena for providing me with a stable operating base and an institutional home for the project in Chad. Many people assisted with fieldwork over the years; I am especially grateful to Gerard, Ali, Appolinaire, Nangbe, Hippolyte, Oundade, Jeremie, Ngarmane, and Patcha. Ngondoloum Salathiel belongs in a category all by himself; it is not hyperbole to say that this project would not have been possible without him. A son of canton Miandoum and the village of Ngalaba, he was my constant companion and the person who held things together even when I was around.
I owe much to the families in canton Miandoum who were part of this project. They were generous with humor, hospitality, information, and time despite their struggles and disappointments. Only a fraction of our exchanges made their way onto these pages, but the many hours spent in their villages and concessions was vital to understanding the project and what it meant to them and to others living in its shadow.
I am fortunate to have a dense social network in Chad that preceded this project and was strengthened by it. Spending time in Chad was a treat because of Moussa and Esther and their family, who opened their house in N Djamena to me and whose friendship now spans half my lifetime. The extended Massingar family holds a special place in my heart and will always make Chad feel like home. Yaya Monique, Rosalie, Patricia, Nestoran, Jonathan, Essaie, Gerard, Paul, Pierre, Getty, Benjamin, and especially Franck, Tatiana, Loic, and Ulrich will always be family to me. My friends at the Prestige and Tchad Evasion, as well as Adoum, Freddy, Mahamat, Yacoub, Zenaba, and so many others, have been kind and generous in ways I can never hope to repay.
My parents asked often and anxiously after this book, probably wishing that my extended trips to Chad and my absences during the holidays would come to an end, though never saying so. My father s love of language and stories and his writerly sensibilities and my mother s sharply analytic mind and her unflinching realism about the world and pragmatic attitude about finding what needs to be done to make it better have given me both inspiration and lots of room to wander. And finally there is Siba, who, somewhat unbelievably, gave up summers in southern France to accompany me to the oil fields of Chad. I don t know anyone else who could have reconfigured his life in such a way or-more important-anyone else who would have. I hope he sees his fingerprints all over these pages.
LIFE IN THE TIME OF OIL
ONE
An Experiment in Development
The entire country has its eyes turned to the Doba region, which has become the center of national attention with the activities of CONOCO . Of course, finding oil is always a roll of the dice. But when the work of this company is crowned with success, supporting industries and complex and specialized installations will proliferate. The key to the problem of development will be found, and we will be able to make over the entirety of Chad.
-President Fran ois Ngarta Tombalbaye, Info-Tchad , December 19, 1973
On my first trip to canton Miandoum, just as the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project was getting underway, Firmin took me to see le premier puits -the first well. 1 It stood in a clearing on an abandoned plot of land, surrounded by scrub brush and high grasses, and was bright red, the color of a fire hydrant. A small metal plaque commemorating the oil find was affixed to the well. By the time I made the pilgrimage to the well with Firmin, everyone knew that other wells-hundreds of them-would follow. Firmin wanted to be photographed next to the first well. The photographs I took of him remind me of others I took of people posing with their prized possessions-not oil wells, but radios, bicy