UC Berkeley

Oil exploration in the global south experienced a rapid upswing in the 2000s. Since 2000, the

majority of new oil-producing states have been in the developing world. Eastern Africa, in

particular, has experienced one of the most significant upsurges in oil and gas development.

Starting in 2005, international oil companies embarked on a $500 million exploration program in

northern Mozambique. The history of oil and gas development in the Global South, however, has

more often than not been one of socio-environmental devastation, violence, expropriation and

oppression. While oil and gas development has generated billions of dollars in revenue,

producing countries suffer from a set of political and economic crises often referred to as the

“resource curse,” and a set of socio-environmental crises excluded from the predominant

“resource curse” narrative.

This dissertation attempts to bridge these frameworks and extend them by conducting a

sociohistoric analysis of authority and extraction in rural northern Mozambique through recent

decades of neoliberal adjustments, and evaluating the institutions and policies guiding oil and gas

exploration and its social and environmental impacts on local populations. Focusing on recent oil and

gas exploration programs in northern, coastal Mozambique, this investigation proceeds by: 1)

tracing the co-evolution of institutionalized rural authority and resource extraction from colonial

through neoliberal adjustments; 2) evaluating the real-time, cumulative impacts to social and

environmental systems resulting from oil and gas exploration considering already-existing

livelihood stressors; and 3) identifying the mechanisms within the primary state-investor-community forum that operates to limit dissent and community reaction to these negative

cumulative impacts--the environmental impact assessment (EIA) public participation meetings.