Assessment of national and international legal frameworks for ensuring socio-economic resilience and environmental protection in Uganda’s petroleum industry

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Tumusiime, TR, 2021. Assessment of national and international legal frameworks for ensuring socio-economic resilience and environmental protection in Uganda’s petroleum industry. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

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Abstract

Historically, majority of developing resource-rich countries that base their economic development on exploring and developing natural resources, tend to be inadequate to utilise that wealth to enhance their economies. Counter-intuitively, these countries experienced worse off economic development outcomes, increased levels of corruption, civil conflict and more authoritarian governments, a phenomenon often referred to as the ‘Resource Curse’ Phenomenon. As a nascent petroleum exploring and producing country, Uganda anticipates a myriad of benefits. However, there are concerns that the new industry would make the country susceptible to the resource curse phenomenon. This thesis critically assesses Uganda’s national and international laws, Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) and Bilateral Investment Treaties (BIT), investigating their adequacy in circumventing the ‘Resource Curse Phenomenon.’ The assessment established that the Government has enacted several laws to govern the petroleum industry. However, the assessment also identified significant disparities in the State’s ability and willingness to implement and enforce the enacted laws. Also, there were several investor-protection terms in the legal framework with a detrimental impact on the Government’s ability to pursue sustainable development, ensure socio-economic resilience and environmental protection. This research proposes several recommendations to the Government, including, clarifying broad and ambiguous terms in the law and petroleum contracts; establishing clear and separate roles for the relevant institutions; establishing a transparent and equitable fiscal regime; utilising petroleum revenues to diversify the economic sector; and establishing liabilities for environmental damage, among others. It expands on the available literature on the ‘Resource Curse Phenomenon’ to include impacts of the petroleum exploration projects on the local environment and communities' human rights, as another symptom of the resource curse.

Item Type:	Thesis
Creators:	Tumusiime, T.R.
Date:	April 2021
Rights:	I confirm that this is my work and that it acknowledges all materials used from other sources. The copyright in this work is held by the author. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any re-use of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed to the author.
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Law School
Record created by:	Jeremy Silvester
Date Added:	25 Feb 2022 10:30
Last Modified:	25 Feb 2022 10:30
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/45764