Between elite reflexes and deliberative impulses: oil and the landscape of contentious politics in Ghana

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.