Life in the Time of Oil: A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad

By Lori Leonard

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Release date: Apr 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780253019875

Reviews for Life in the Time of Oil

[carolee888 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In Life in the Time of Oil: A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad by Lori Leonard, this book is a scholarly written piece so it should be reviewed with that in mind. It is slow reading and but made me think. A project that started out to help get the poor people out of poverty started out with good intentions but was not thought out previously. The project ended up victimizing the very people it was supposed to help.I thought I could imagine the depth of poverty in Chad but I was not prepared. The book reminded me of the children near an airport of India where they scavenged piles and piles of trash and tried to survive. In chapter 5, In the Midst of Things were photos of extreme poverty. People only survived by trying to figure out to use trash. Unlike the children in India book, they did not have buyers for scrap metal, plastic and so on but were dependent on the scraps for their furniture and doors, and not told what they were free to take and what they would get into trouble to take.The lack of education was also a big surprise and it cannot be assumed that teaching writing would bring an understanding of all the things that we assume go with literacy. One point of this book is that you need to learn the culture of the people and depth of what they do not have before you can make a reasonable contribution to their lives. It seems like the project was truly a mistake. You may be jeopardizing their lives rather than helping them.I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher as a win from FirstReads but that in no way made a difference in my thoughts or feelings in this review.