‘Doomed by the ‘Resource Curse?’ Fish and Oil Conflicts in the Western Gulf of Guinea, Ghana

Abstract

In 2010, Ghana celebrated its first commercial oil production from its large Jubilee field. However, the establishment of no-go buffer zones around oil infrastructures offshore to enhance oil and gas development has led to conflicts over the use of ocean space and the exclusion of small-scale fishers from former fishing grounds in the western region of Ghana. From a theoretical perspective, the resource curse theory would explain this conflict between fishing and oil activities in Ghana as an inevitable outcome of natural resource development. Using the conflict between small-scale fisheries and the oil and gas industry in Western Ghana as the case study, the resource curse theory and its application is contrasted with alternative approaches to understand the conflict.