Angola: Civil Society Actors and Petroleum Management

Abstract

Angola has enjoyed few development benefits from its petroleum resources. This chapter describes how the ruling party’s periodic clampdowns on civil society and increasingly heavy-handed tactics serve to limit the autonomy of many actors to influence public debate. As a result, both reformist and confrontational strategies are unlikely to have a significant impact on the government’s management of petroleum resources. An important aspect of the situation in Angola is the polarization of society and the country’s decades of civil war, driven in part by external powers using different Angolan political-military blocs as proxies. In that regard, there are similarities with the polarization of several Latin American oil- and gas-producing states, but the role of external political influence and the level of violence have probably been greater in Angola. Angola also resembles the post-Soviet states in that there is a relatively diverse and active civil society, but some of the main civil society actors have been created, promoted or co-opted by the state.