The Political Economy of Energy Resources: Local Content in Petroleum Industry of South Sudan

The paper explores local content in oil and gas industry. It does so through the analysis of indicators used to measure success of local content. The paper also argues the relevance of local content in global oil and gas. It has detailed this through economic empowerment, employment, training and capacity building, transfer of technology and sustainability of businesses. While the paper delves into local content, the cases of Ghana and Nigeria lead, while South Sudan lags behind. But it has demonstrated its commitment towards local content through local content regulations 2019 that measure local content through procurement of goods and services, national goods and services, local employment and training, knowledge transfer, local content plans and reports. The impacts of local content via negatives and positive impacts are assessed. It has vividly come out that the negative impacts of local content are corruption in the procurement of goods and services to South Sudanese, poor technologies and knowledge transfer and lack of financial capability to implement the local content provisions. On the positive impact is ongoing efforts being exerted by the government and petroleum industry in South Sudan in implementing local content. Examples such as the increase of recruitment of locals that stands at 80% are commendable. The paper deployed a case study of Ghana, Nigeria and South Sudan, comparative method, process tracing and empirical literature review as a methodology for this study. Although the paper concludes that the Government of South Sudan, Ministry of Petroleum and particularly, Petroleum Authority of South Sudan should assign local content implementation and monitoring unit, the entire local content elements and provisions? implementation should be a work of all the stakeholders. While South Sudan should remodel its local content policy to be broad base rather being on target as it is now, the devil that prevents the realization of local content in South Sudan lies in lack of implementation. The paper recommends future research on the importance of local content policy focusing on South Sudanese women in petroleum industry. Nonetheless, political economy of energy, in particularly, local content is quite valuable in the advancement of industrialization and prosperity of mankind.