Life in the Time of Oil A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad [Hardcover]

Life in the Time of Oil examines the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Projecta partnership between global oil companies, the World Bank, and the Chadian government that was an ambitious scheme to reduce poverty in one of the poorest countries on the African continent. Key to the project was the development of a marginal set of oilfields that had only recently attracted the interest of global oil companies who were pressed to expand operations in the context of declining reserves. Drawing on more than a decade of work in Chad, Lori Leonard shows how environmental standards, grievance mechanisms, community consultation sessions, and other model policies smoothed the way for oil production, but ultimately contributed to the unraveling of the project. Leonard offers a nuanced account of the effects of the project on everyday life and the local ecology of the oilfield region as she explores the resulting tangle of ethics, expectations, and effects of oil as development.

Lori Leonard is International Professor and Associate Professor in Development Sociology at Cornell University.

Lori Leonard's signature achievement in this book is that she offers an ethnographic analysis of a development project that is simultaneously an examination of oil companies and the practices of global capitalism and an account of the experience and consequences for ordinary people who are touted to be beneficiaries but in fact often end up victims.

Acknowledgments
1. An Experiment in Development
2. Dead Letters
3. Becoming Eligible
4. Ties that Bind
5. In the Midst of Things
6. Footprints
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Overall, Leonard advances a convincing and credible argument that the failure of the oil project has not only happened at the macro level, but has also done lasting damage to communities in the local and everyday sphere.

Life in the Time of Oilis important, providing rich empirical insight organized in an accessil£*