Towards crude transformation: Scaling development in Uganda's Albertine graben

Abstract

This paper explores the patterns of oil-driven transformation in Uganda's Lake Albert Basin. Drawing on empirical and secondary data, the paper critiques the ongoing drive towards crude transformation which in part, has morphed into controversial local level development agenda amongst communities in the oil-rich Albertine Graben. From the theoretical optics of scale, the paper highlights the contradictions in the attempt by the Ugandan state and multinational corporations to engender subaltern socioeconomic transformation through oil-inspired projects. Whereas the attempts at transformation are motivated by the so-called international standards of corporate operations, the framing by which the local has been (re)produced is a likely jeopardy rather than support towards an oil-driven change for better in two salient ways: first, that the local represents a problematic category in a development arena, which, in this context, has aided different forms of institutional dispossession and marginalisation of the communities hosting different oil projects and activities. Secondly, this misrepresentation of the local is a commonplace mischief of scale politics in development planning and practice. The paper advances an argument that such mischiefs of scale politics could be altered by viewing the local as important, active and potentially productive part of the multi-scalar teleconnections of positive transformation, such as that offered by Uganda's surging oil industry.