Energy Justice by Rukonge Sospeter Muhongo

Author:Rukonge Sospeter Muhongo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030613389
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5.7 Examples of Energy Justice and Local Content in Sub-Saharan African Countries

Oil and gas resources are discovered in marginalised areas and areas that have poor oil and gas resource governance skills and mechanisms. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the oil and gas resources have been found in remote rural areas that are populated by local people, and these people have been regarded as unproductive, with fragile eco-systems and high insecurity.69

In all case study countries, namely Norway, Brazil, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, have all found oil and gas resources within the vicinity of local people in these countries. The Southern Tanzania local people in Mtwara and Lindi, the Saami people in Northern Norway, the local territories of Brazil the lands of the Suruwaha, Banawa, Deni and Paumari Indians, the local people of the Niger Delta, the local community in the Albertine Region of Uganda and lastly the local people of Turkana in Kenya. The oil and gas industry affects different spheres of a community, society and country. Namely the economic, political, and sociocultural aspects at different levels within the oil and gas industry. These ramifications that call for the advocacy of justice, particularly energy justice as a constant factor in policy adaptation and implementation.

At the macro-level, oil and gas resources have fundamentally not been exemplary due to the unequal distribution of wealth between the local people of a given country.70 This has led to political instability in numerous oil and gas-rich countries such as Nigeria, Angola, Cameroon, Chad, Kenya and Tanzania, to name a few.

These local people suffer from dispossession from land and degradation of the environment due to the oil and gas industry operations at the micro-level where the local people who have the oil and gas resources within their vicinity. This undermines the local people’s economic ecosystem along with conflicts, tensions in the ethnic minorities.71 Energy justice, in this case, is related to how local content policies facilitate the inclusion and participation of the local people into the oil and gas value chain. Energy justice determines to what extent local content policies disseminate equal inclusion and exclusion patterns with the critical aim of cracking through the enclave nature of the oil and gas industry. The concept of energy justice merges its discussions on the principles of justice, and that is considering the economic, social aspects and implications of energy resource development onto the immediate community.72 The debate on energy justice principles being entrenched in the adaptation and implementation of local content policies must move beyond the mere distribution harms and benefits. The three tenets of energy justice, namely distributive justice, recognition and procedural justice must be incorporated into the legal and regulatory process which creates the local content policies within a given oil and gas-rich country.

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