This study explores the concepts of globalization, gender relations, and land tenure, and the intersection of these concepts in a globalizing project, represented by the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline project in selected communities in Cameroon. It questions the theories of globalization, the construction of women and men in the project, particularly as concern land resources. This work will appeal to scholars in social and management sciences, gender studies and environmental sciences in Africa, development agencies and multinational companies like the World Bank and petroleum consortiums, and policy makers.

“[A] tale of imperial hubris, rough and tumble politics, and the duplicity of what passes as corporate social responsibility . . . important and compelling.” —Michael Watts, University of California, Berkeley Life in the Time of Oil examines the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project—a 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.

In the prelude to the current scramble for natural resources in Africa, several leading global oil companies and the World Bank (WB) got engaged in 2000 in a large oil extraction and export project in Chad, with a pipeline built across Cameroon to the Atlantic. The revenue management system then adopted by Chad under WB advice, designed to ensure the Chadian gains from this project would effectively support development could not entirely resist policy interests and domestic pressures to spend the proceeds in other ways than pre-accorded, including for security. The World Bank eventually pulled away from this venture but the human and social development impact of Chadian-determined uses of these resources has marked progress over comparable situations elsewhere.