[Review of] The petro-developmental state in Africa: Making oil work in Angola, Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea

The past decade has witnessed a phenomenal upswing in the number of legislative and policy instruments seeking to promote local content, especially within resource-rich countries where governments have imposed quotas for local employment, procurement and value creation on foreign extractive firms. Jesse Ovadia’s The Petro-Developmental State in Africa: Making oil work in Angola, Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea joins the growing list of studies that have sought to capture the allure of this newfound governance tool by scrutinising its effects on the development landscape of oil-rich states in Sub-Saharan Africa. The book is grounded in a heartfelt reflection on Ovadia’s journey across different knowledge streams about Africa’s developmental trajectories, which have led him to question simplistic, ahistorical and deterministic postulations.