“People are as Poor as They Were Before the Companies Came”: A Longitudinal Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility Practices in a New Oil Frontier

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a-taken-for granted practice used by the global extractive industries to build and maintain support for new oil and mining projects in Africa’s frontier locations. However, less is understood about the complexities of the early stages of establishing a large-scale industry project, including how and why different companies go about implementing CSR, and what this means for outcomes. This paper presents a longitudinal study exploring how Western and Chinese oil companies engage in CSR over a ten-year period to establish operations in Uganda’s oil frontier. Drawing on primary and secondary qualitative case study material collected over a decade, we present the types of CSR activities that were implemented during the pre-production period of the industry and consider how and why these activities changed over the project timeline and differed between companies. We highlight the multi-scalar and multi-dimensional nature of legitimation processes and the interaction of the social, economic, and political licences as companies negotiate with interests at multiple scales and seek to mitigate various forms of risk. While the oil companies’ rhetoric is on the social licence to operate, in the face of challenges and uncertainties it is the economic and political licenses that can take precedence, thus limiting the possibility of local development benefits from companies’ CSR activities.

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility, social licence to operate, Extractive Industries, oil frontier, Uganda