In-depth Synopsis of Local Content Literature

Muhongo, Rukonge Sospeter

The history of local content policies depicts the economic aspect of local content policies. But literature shows that local content policies have a political and social paradigm that stretches the mandate of local content policies beyond value-addition. The spatial dimension of local content policies is the main aspect dictating local content policy implementation. The national content policy advocates for the whole nation, while the community content advocates for the host community and the regional content advocates for a regional integration mechanism of neighbouring states in local content implementation. The spatial dimension of local content policies provides a trajectory on issues such as the resource curse and how countries spiral to this uncertainty. It should be noted that justice has developed the spatial dimension to advocate for a collective effort in local population integration into the oil and gas industry. The chapter also shows some authors' debates that local content policies deter further investments because they increase costs for the multinational corporations, while governments are not ready to leave the foreign investors to design what should be regarded as content in local content due to the fears of re-visiting the failures of corporate social responsibility mechanisms in developing resource-rich countries. This chapter makes an in-depth analysis on different dimensions of local content policy implementation as well as identifying the gap in local content literature using energy justice as a theoretical construct.