Anticipatory CSR: Legitimacy politics in Uganda's pre-production oil sector

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a taken-for-granted practice used by the global extractive industries, yet its role in the early stages of large-scale oil and mining projects remains underexplored. This paper presents a longitudinal study of how Western and Chinese oil companies implemented CSR in Uganda's Albertine Graben between 2006 and 2016. Drawing on over a hundred interviews and document analysis, we trace how CSR shifted from ad hoc local philanthropy to more professionalised and strategically targeted interventions as companies sought to establish operations over an unusually long exploration period. Using the lens of political CSR, we show how CSR functioned as an anticipatory political practice, through which companies negotiated legitimacy across scales, managed elite relationships, and shaped regulatory space before oil production began. We further demonstrate that CSR operated as political currency, strategically deployed to secure economic and political licences by negotiating with local communities, subnational elites, and national government actors. While companies framed CSR around the ‘social licence to operate’, in practice the economic and political licences took precedence as firms sought to mitigate risk, secure investor confidence, and manage state relations. The findings extend debates on political CSR by highlighting its anticipatory role, its use as political currency, and its implications for governance and benefit-sharing in Africa's contemporary extractive industries. • Examines CSR in Uganda's oil sector during a decade-long pre-production phase. • Shows CSR as an anticipatory political practice shaping governance before oil flows. • Demonstrates CSR operated as political currency across local, subnational, and national levels. • Reveals how state and elite actors co-produced and instrumentalised CSR strategically. • Highlights the contested nature of ‘community’ in CSR and benefit distribution.