The Principle of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources and Petroleum Extraction in Uganda

This chapter examines the extent to which petroleum extraction in Uganda is underpinned by historical principles that sought to re-orient such industries away from their non-developmental pasts. Using the lens of the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources (PSNR), the chapter scrutinises the salient features of petroleum extraction in order to assess their embeddedness in this principle. The findings reveal that the principles have been extensively applied, but that their efficacy in achieving resource sovereignty and sustainable development has been constrained by a partial rejection of classical extractivism, whose exploitative forms the principle set out to eliminate in the first place. This is due to the constraints of relying on foreign possessors of extractive capital, whose interest is profit maximisation at the least cost and often at the expense of the resource owners. In other words, as long as resource-rich states continue to rely on the foreign entities for the development of their factors of production, their sovereignty will always be compromised, and their efforts at attaining full development based on resource exploitation will result in compensatory development as is happening in Uganda so far unless more effective regulation is applied beyond paper rhetoric.