The politics of local content implementation in Ghana's oil and gas sector

Research on Ghana's local content development has generally been dominated by insights that situate policy implementation within political commitments to govern oil in the national interest. Grounding such insights within an extended political settlement analysis, this paper offers some counter-intuitive explanations to these broad arguments by situating Ghana's local content implementation commitments within the deeper forms of politics and power relations within its political system. The ruling party's approach to enforcing the local content policy reveals some level of political commitment to protecting Ghana's interest. Operating within an increasingly competitive political context however, ruling elites implemented local content in line with the tendencies within Ghana's competitive clientelist political settlement, namely; coalition building, clientelism and ideational elements. The findings underline a core political settlements argument that the primary factors driving local content implementation in Ghana are neither 'institutions' nor broad politics' per se, but rather by the inter-elite power relationships within the ruling coalition, underpinned by interests and ideas.