The Gas and Oil Sector in Ghana: The Role of Civil Society and the Capacity Needs for Effective Environmental Governance

Abstract

Africa is at a crossroads in terms of growth, development, governance, and sustainability: Can it seize its chances and transcend its somewhat lackluster first half-century? The authors of this volume, individually and collectively, believe so. Evidence put forth sug- gests that from Africa is emerging a new, more complex, evidence-based, participatory, and coordinated vision of NRM. This vision of natural resource-based development is motivated by an increasingly diversified and empowered portfolio of stakeholders and actors. The implication is that real growth and transformation based on natural resources is possible. Numerous and important opportunities for turning Africa’s natural resource wealth into sustainable and broad-based development exist. Africa can benefit from “new donors” and “innovative sources of finance” as it seeks to revise its natural resource sector: from SWFs and new foundations to the Gulf states, Korea, Turkey, as well as the BRICS. New technologies already allow for the discovery of new sources of oil and gas from South Sudan to northern Mozambique, so new regions may arise around pipelines and other energy logistics/corridors (Ulrike and Rempe 2013). Also, novel forms of “global” or “private” gover- nance, from the Kimberley Process (KP) and the EITI to the “conflict minerals” component of the omnibus Dodd-Frank bill, while insightful, present challenges of compliance and reporting (Hanson et al. 2012). Accordingly, other contributions, in a forward-looking stance, call for rethinking and redoubling of efforts by Africans to advance leader- ship capacity, as well as individual and institutional capacity to tackle emerging issues and challenges, and more importantly pursue a “good- fit” rather than a “best practice” approach to the management and transformation of the continent’s vast and diversified natural resource endowments. High levels of poverty, rising inequalities, unsustainable unemploy- ment rates (especially among the youth and vulnerable populations), corruption, and environmental and climate change concerns are con- tributing to eroding the quality of life and life expectancy of the vast majority of African people. African dynamics such as an increased demographic pressure on spaces where the resources are concentrated, and internal migrations that escape any accurate monitoring and con- trol are becoming sensitive problems even far beyond the African continent. Natural resources can and have to be propelling instruments, help- ing African countries to improve their economies in a sustainable way, to contribute to reform institutions to make them efficient and effec- tive. Given their crucial commercial weight, they offer a chance to enhance a virtuous circle, in which better practices encourage a more engaged leadership to emerge, more accountability and transparency at the national level, more active, organized, and capable CSOs, and an equally more powerful private sector, helping to diversify the economies and fight successfully against widespread unemployment and dangerous social and spatial inequalities. This is possible because, as this volume argues, Africa is already on a good path: these efforts must be continued, but buttressed by knowledge sharing and cooperation.