Anticipating Oil: The Temporal Politics of a Disaster Yet to Come

Cursed resources

In the wake of the global financial crisis, citizens in the West have been encouraged to develop a certain economic proficiency and exercise vigilance, lest such a disaster repeats itself. In Britain, there are TV programmes that teach hapless citizens to take care of their personal finances; hundreds of people famously camped outside St Paul's Cathedral as part of the Occupy London campaign; and my 16-year-old stepson submitted an account of his own attempted occupation of the Oxford branch of a high street bank as part of his GCSE coursework for ‘Citizenship Studies’. These practices come alongside the post-2008 austerity policies that purport to mitigate some of the worst effects of the crisis as well as ongoing deliberations about regulatory and institutional reforms (cf. Lakoff, 2010: 2). Embedded, here, are fresh proposals for individual and collective reorientation in the face of potential economic calamity. Arguably, the citizens of Europe and the US could also look for inspiration towards the experiences of their counterparts in the ‘global South’. There, a sense of economic crisis has been an almost everyday condition and has been accompanied, for some time, by programmes designed to foster a public understanding of economics, broadly conceived, and to encourage a specific temporal orientation that might counteract corrupt practices and other economic misdemeanours in the future.

This article examines the temporal politics of such efforts to anticipate economic disaster, specifically disaster related to natural resource wealth. I consider anticipation as an ‘affective state’, that is, ‘not just a reaction, but a way of actively orienting oneself temporally’ (Adams et al., 2009: 247, emphasis omitted). To anticipate is not simply to expect; it is to realize that something is about to happen and, importantly, to act on that premonition. Distinguishing between this and other possible orientations towards the future is critical to what I term the temporal politics of a disaster yet to come. I draw on ethnographic research in the African Atlantic island state of São Tomé and Príncipe (STP), a Portuguese colony until 1974 and currently the world's third smallest economy ¹ but with potentially significant oil reserves in its maritime territory. In expectation of great resource wealth, the country's barely 200,000 inhabitants -its governors, public servants and citizens - have been admonished to be vigilant of a ‘resource curse’. ² Through the institutions they build, the laws they ratify, the accounts they publish or, in essence, through the ways in which they concern themselves with a future with oil, Santomeans are urged to display their preparedness.

Importantly, as a type of economic disaster, the resource curse is not sudden or unforeseen. ³ In the formulations of scholars, policy-makers, and activists, it emerges as a slow-burning phenomenon associated with resource booms or dependency on resource revenues, especially in developing countries, and is frequently identified with economic stagnation, social inequality, and even civil war (Auty, 1993; Collier and Hoeffler, 2000; Karl, 1997; Ross, 2012; Sachs and Warner, 2001). In this view, the curse eats away at a country's economic and political institutions or prevents them from fully developing in the first place, and may be exacerbated by the presence of despotic leaders, corrupt governments, and the rent-seeking behaviour of political elites. Given this, the assumption is that if the right measures are taken the curse may be preventable.

‘Disasters do not just happen’, write anthropologists Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman (2002:3). Not only do they require the presence of a human population as disaster's point of impact; they are compounded by specific political structures or cultural beliefs. I would add that they are co-produced by human and non-human factors in another sense as well. In my research to date, I have aimed to explore the complex articulations of the resource curse as an economic device and the worlds to which it applies itself, rather than to assess the validity of its empiricist claims (Weszkalnys, 2011). ⁴ Here, I show how within the contemporary epistemic practices of the international financial institutions, quasi- and non-governmental institutions, and the extractive industries, oil has acquired an inherently destructive or disastrous potential, in addition to the generative potential that is characteristic of resources per se (cf. Ferry and Limbert, 2008). Potentiality, as Giorgio Agamben (1999) writes, works as ‘the presence of an absence’. I take up this notion in thinking about the effects of absent oil. Specifically, I raise the question of how social scientific and associated knowledge practices, such as those that underwrite the resource curse, help constitute ontologies of disastrous matter and of how this matter should be dealt with, for example, by technical or political means.

This article asks what political forms, objects, and affects are generated by disaster in the making, such as STP's anticipated resource curse? Conversely, how does this disaster that is yet to come articulate a particular temporal politics that demands close attentiveness to what the future holds? I do not seek to establish one (disaster) as cause for the other (temporal politics) but suggest their mutuality. Put briefly, anticipation unfolds with disaster in mind, and it confirms the need to be ready for the worst. Global policy and nongovernmental agencies as well as international and Santomean actors have posited STP as the instantiation of a generalized, global phenomenon (the resource curse) to which anticipation is the appropriate response.

In my own analysis, the STP case becomes an instantiation of a broader contemporary anticipatory regime (Adams et al., 2009). I infer from it a specific temporal politics that I call the ‘not yet’ of disaster. ⁵ I demonstrate that far from being an empty placeholder, the ‘not yet’ (or potentially disastrous oil) has been productive of new entities, organizational forms, and subjectivities. This is played out, for example, in the oil-related institutions set up as protection against an oil curse, and in the mobilization of civil society ready to hold government and industry accountable. In my conclusion, I shall suggest that rather than a bridging moment that takes us from the present to the future in a straightforward line, the ‘not yet’ is better seen as an unfolding, a faltering, and a distribution of temporalities - for suspicion (triggered not least by demands to be vigilant) seems to make anticipation an always incomplete endeavour.

The ‘not yet’ of resource disaster

What kind of disaster is the resource curse? Consider this cartoon that appeared in a leaflet about oil - its extraction, circulation, and effects - distributed in 2004 among large parts of the Santomean population. The leaflet was part of a consultation process run in the context of a so-called National Forum that was to bring unity to the Santomean people following an attempted coup d‘état in the previous year. As a potentially divisive factor in Santomean society, oil had become a special focus of this consultative work. The leaflet was designed by an advisory team from the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City, headed by the renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs and sponsored by the Open Society Institute. ⁶ Among other things, the team had been instrumental in drawing up a resource-revenue management law for STP. The cartoon juxtaposed a landscape devastated by flooding, with houses submerged in water and trees uprooted, with another made fertile by the controlled flow of water for irrigation and populated by smiling people. The accompanying text read:

The new law, it was implied, would wall off an area of Santomean jurisdiction, perfecting it, making it watertight, and creating a legislative enclave in what is largely perceived as a sea of partiality and arbitrariness. It would thus prevent a future resource disaster.

Floods, tsunamis or earthquakes are perhaps more typical of the sort of phenomena described as disaster than the effects brought by the influx of large revenues from oil. Disasters are usually conceived as spatially and temporally circumscribed events, causing great physical destruction or loss of life, and evoking visceral responses, shock and anger among victims, witnesses and onlookers (Sims, 2007). Attempts to press these events into social scientific definitions struggle to include these affective dimensions, the profound sensation of loss of human mastery and control, that is, disaster's ‘more-than-rational’ aspects (cf. Clark, 2011). Disasters have been defined as ‘combining a potentially destructive agent/force from the natural, modified, or built environment’ and a population rendered vulnerable due to particular circumstances, including its geographic location, the absence of infrastructures, or a lack of adequate social organization (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 2002: 4). Disaster studies researchers have argued that social and political factors are crucial in exacerbating disaster, as is a lack (or overload) of information and data, and depending on their degree of vulnerability, some people may be hit harder than others (eg Hoffman and Oliver-Smith, 1999; Lakoff, 2010; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 2002; Quarantelli, 1998; Sarat and Lezaun, 2009). ⁸ Disasters are, therefore, seen as events that can be anticipated if not always wholly prevented.

Implicit in such struggles for definition are, in addition, persistent questions regarding the ontology of disaster: What dependencies does disaster imply between ‘natural’ and ‘social’ things? How does it give opportunities to stake out what is and what is not human? Should we judge disaster by its causes, its effects, or the responses it provokes? There are also questions about disaster's timing -when does it start?; when does it end? - vague temporal markers drawn out by practices of preparedness and recovery. In this section, I want to briefly address these questions in relation to the resource curse.

The cartoon's allegorical elision between floods of water and floods of revenue from a natural resource is suggestive of the ways in which resources, too, have been seen as ‘natural agents’ capable of causing catastrophic damage to the populations on which they act. Of course, it may be argued that oil's primary potential for causing disaster is not allegorical at all but derives from its undoubted polluting capacities, wreaking havoc and bodily suffering in human and non-human populations due to corporate neglect or technological failure (cf. McGuire and Austin, 2013). Oil's destructive capacity has been further associated with its plenitude or its finitude. On the one hand, humankind's ability to be a most forceful ‘geological agent’ (Clark, 2012: 261) causing irrevocable climatic damage is certainly underwritten by the seemingly continuous discovery of new hydrocarbon sources. On the other hand, such discovery is justified by gesturing towards the eventual exhaustion of hydrocarbon reserves, another resource disaster for which humankind has struggled to prepare.

The other disastrous potential of oil, the resource curse, which is the focus of this article, is similarly the outcome of a whole techno-social-material arrangement (Mitchell, 2009; Watts, 2004; Weszkalnys, 2013). It involves extractive infrastructures such as platforms and pipelines, administrative entities and government bodies, global policies, and work safety regulations typical of the industry, and is modulated, though not overdetermined, by the specific properties of the substance we call oil. However the curse has much to do with what scholars have identified as the manufactured scarcity of oil (Labban, 2008), and follows from oil's ontological conversion from a substance found in the subsoil into a financial asset, revenue, or sums of money. Occasionally, it is thought to be just the expectation of oil that causes the curse to happen.

In this view, the resource curse becomes, to mix metaphors, one of the ‘original sins’ of the Anthropocene: ⁹ That which Nature has given us to enable human flourishing and happiness is deemed to bear within itself a destructive potential, called forth by greedy and thoughtless human acts. The impacts of the oil curse are seen as gradual, to some extent foreseeable, and the damages it causes as largely indirect (eg Humphreys et al., 2007a). There has been a continuous displacement of more resource-deterministic accounts of the curse with accounts that seek to explain the curse in terms of economic, institutional, or socio-cultural factors. As a consequence, greater emphasis is now placed on the curse's non-quantitative, or at least not fully calculable, aspects. Prudence and restraint, in the form of institutions, regulations, and corporate and public-sector ethics, are advocated as the remedy for the oil curse.

In STP, worries about the uncertain future of the nascent oil economy were not empirically unfounded. From the start, the country's involvement in the oil sector was troubled by unfavourable agreements, accusations of bribery and corruption, and diplomatic disputes. In 1997, the country signed a fateful contract with a virtually unknown and largely inexperienced US oil company, the Environmental Remediation Holding Corporation (ERHC), which promised to deliver STP's offshore oil. In return for a fee of US$5 million, ESRC gained preferential access to oil concessions; it also promised to initiate scientific assessments of the country's oil prospects and to attract additional foreign investors with the necessary know-how and capital. The deal has been widely decried as imbalanced and decidedly unfavourable for the country (Shaxson, 2007). In addition, Nigeria questioned STP's claim to an exclusive economic zone, resulting in the creation of a joint development zone straddling the two countries' maritime territory and shared at a ratio of 40:60 (STP: Nigeria). International observers have consistently interpreted such occurrences, including the attempted coup d'état in 2003, as indicators of an incipient resource curse (Weszkalnys, 2011). For them, these were early warning signs of a disaster yet to come.

The disastrous capacity of Santomean oil has partly been explained in terms of geopolitics. São Tomé and Príncipe denote two points in the chain of volcanic islands running diagonally south-westwards from Mount Cameroon through the Gulf of Guinea. The region's tumultuous geology, a long history of exploration, and more recent significant finds have made it one of Africa's most prominent oil frontiers. But Gulf of Guinea oil has also been marked out as particularly problematic. Most, if not all, of the oil-producing countries straddling the Gulf of Guinea coast - from Nigeria to Angola - have been diagnosed with one or another version of the resource curse (Shaxson, 2007; Soares de Oliveira, 2007). These specific and deeply localized disastrous situations can be expressed in the economist's universalizing script of statistical correlations, and be compared and contrasted with similar phenomena elsewhere. At the same time, the resource curse's range of impact is clearly presumed to be global. This is echoed in the contributions to Escaping the Resource Curse, a volume that is intended as a compendium for policy and decision makers in resource-rich countries and that draws directly on the advisory work some of the contributing authors carried out in the future oil state of São Tomé and Príncipe. As the editors write:

Across the globe, efforts to avoid a curse now abound. For example, the World Bank, keen to harness the power of natural resources for ‘sustainable’ development, has made resource governance a central policy issue. Global campaigns such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), announced by British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002, constitute another effort to create transparency in the natural resource sector by bringing national governments, companies, and civil society to one table with open books. There is also the Resource Charter, a set of principles and suggestions for policy-makers in resource-rich countries, written by an eclectic group of scholars and practitioners, such as economist Paul Collier and Peter Eigen, the founder of the Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International. ¹⁰ In addition, there are numerous non-governmental organizations, including Global Witness, Revenue Watch, and Transparency International that have made the link between natural resources and corruption, war and similar economic and political disaster their cause. These organizations, their programmes and activities partake, without completely exhausting, what Andrew Barry (2006) has called a technological zone of qualification typical of the contemporary oil industry. Within this zone, issues of transparency and ethical conduct have become subject to new kinds of evaluation, standard judgements, and regulation.

Taking this observation further, I want to connect the techno-political governance of oil to the proliferating regimes of anticipation identified by Adams et al. (2009). Indeed, some scholars suggest that notions of disaster have become characteristic of the contemporary condition. In this view, we all live and act always with the worst-case scenario in mind (Adams et al., 2009; Beck, 1992; Sarat and Lezaun, 2009). It could be argued that the resource curse can be considered a disaster not primarily because it is a disaster like a flood or an earthquake, but because the activities designed to prevent a curse, such as those implemented in STP, are akin to what people have done elsewhere to prepare themselves for disaster. Oil, especially potentially disastrous oil, thus receives a temporal framing, which I refer to as the ‘not yet’ of disaster. My notion of the ‘not yet’ of disaster has much in common with anthropologist Jane Guyer's account of the near future (Guyer, 2007). In Guyer's somewhat disheartening sketch, an overly dominant emphasis on what macroeconomists refer to as the long term has led to a gradual evacuation of the near future. She invites us to explore what has come to fill the near future at this time as a kind of ethical project for the here and now. Indeed, I argue that the ‘not yet’ of disaster is filled with busy activity. Charters, policies, and campaigns are aimed at transforming potentially ‘bad’ into ‘good’ oil. However, I do not think that they therefore contain a disavowal of the economists' long term; rather they are about a reordering and recalibration of energies and affects, and the means with which to achieve such ends.

In other words, STP's potentially disastrous oil has produced a temporal politics of anticipation that is animated by a variety of programmes, plans, and measures. The disaster-yet-to-come is politically productive not just because, as a moment of breakdown and social, political, and economic exposure, it is a test to human-made systems and legal and political infrastructures (Sarat and Lezaun, 2009). Its capacity for politics rests also not simply in the ways in which it can become politically expedient, instrumentalized in neoliberal policy-making in order to push through different kinds of policies that prescribe austerity and free market mechanisms, and take away health care and other welfare provisions, leading to even greater calamity for the poor (Klein, 2007). Rather, potentially ‘bad’ oil has mapped out its own political space, framed by notions of scientific, technological, and economic management, and by contestation, moral evaluation, and ethical concerns (Barry, 2001; Braun and Whatmore, 2010). It is this process to which I now turn.

‘Bad’ oil politics

‘There is no oil yet. But we need to prepare’, noted the head of STP's parliamentary commission for oil matters in our interview. Preparations in STP have been comprehensive, aimed at realizing oil's generative potential and creating resilience in the face of its negative impacts. Scientific expeditions have been sent out to establish petroleum prospects through seismic research. The government successfully, if not without dispute, applied for recognition of its maritime boundaries with the United Nations Law of the Sea Commission. Several licensing rounds have been held to allocate exploration rights to multinational consortia of oil companies who bid millions of dollars and promise much technological and human resource investment. At the same time, legislative guidelines for the collection, distribution, and use of oil revenues have been passed, including the so-called Abuja declaration, a document signed by STP and Nigeria that promises the publication of contracts, revenues, and expenditures in relation to the two country's joint development zone. In addition, dedicated entities - from a ministry for natural resources to a parliamentary commission and a national petroleum agency - have been set up to manage the new national asset.

STP's oil emerges as a kind of technical cum political ‘gathering’ (Latour, 2004) whose multiple contours are visualized by seismic measurements, delineated by maritime boundaries, inscribed in the contracts signed with international partners and investors, and regulated nationally and in the global domain by laws and agreements. Even the IMF economists I talked to, who monitored the country's economic performance, did not apprehend future oil purely as an economic category. As I show in the following, oil's potentially disastrous consequences are dispersed across an array of institutions, technical devices, regulations, and administrative, commercial, and political practices, where this potential gets stabilized, albeit momentarily, in specific ways.

The oil sector has become, without a doubt, one of the most developed parts of STP's public administration today. Let's take STP's National Petroleum Agency as an example. ¹¹ In a sense, the Agency has anticipation as its modus operandi and is key to the country's project of becoming an exemplary oil state in the context of the ill-fated Gulf of Guinea. Funded by a World Bank infrastructure and capacity-building programme (which since 2003 has focused on the improvement of oil-related infrastructures in STP), the Agency has been in charge of overseeing government policy in the sector. It embodies a notion of ‘good governance’ ¹² that has become central to the World Bank's efforts to defend its support for natural resource extraction as a source of ‘sustainable development’, in the face of multiplying reports about their negative social, environmental, and economic effects (cf. Liebenthal et al., 2005). Institutional and regulatory failure is branded as the primary cause of countries' inability to turn resource wealth into economic prosperity. Consequently, notions of good governance and transparency have been the preferred instruments with which to effect transformation. This resonates with a broader policy shift within the Bank. Specifically in sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank began in the late 1980s to pursue a project of so-called political renewal in order to ‘reconstruct the state, its personnel, the institutional structure necessary to sustain a market economy, and the nature of society itself’ (Williams, 2008: 49). Indeed, World Bank policy would seem increasingly hybrid, reconnecting abstract economic ideals with political expediency (Williams, 2008).

The multiple facets of oil as a new ‘matter of concern’ (Latour, 2004) are built into the Agency's structure - comprised of a technical, an environmental, an economic, and a legal department. Staff asserted the Agency's explicit, if precarious, a-political function. ¹³ They claimed to hold a merely technical an advisory role. Discussions about revenues and transparency, I was informed, were being led elsewhere. This self-consciously technocratic spirit guided individual and collective performance, as did the strategy papers, annual training plans, production sharing contracts, forms of accounting, seminars run by international consultants, and training trips abroad. Staff were learning about oil geology, prospectivity, and economic modelling, at the same time that they were improving their negotiating and English-language skills. Personal performance, in this context, was improved not only by the much-cherished capacity building aimed at enhancing individual talent but also by standardizing skills and behaviour.

In this way, the Agency constitutes one of STP's many prospective infrastructures, seeking to achieve procedural and behavioural change to ensure transparent and objective conduct, based on balanced information and best practice, emulating similar institutions in countries such as Norway and Brazil. ¹⁴ In some sense, the Agency is a locally inflected imitation of scripts and devices that pass through the global circuits of the international financial institutions, think tanks, and other centres of expertise. Far from being merely technical or auxiliary this type of infrastructure is arranged to prevent a future resource disaster. It is to deliver particular goods associated with oil - or, more precisely, to assure that the oil delivered will be good.

It would be wrong, however, to see the stabilization of oil's disastrous potential as the outcome of World Bank policy alone. Some institutions and individuals may quite clearly hold more ‘powers of definition’; but even those who do not do so to the same extent may be compliant with their terms or be required to instantiate them in their actions (Simmons, 2003). For example, STP's state-of-the-art oil management legislation I referred to earlier was the result of unrelated but convergent advisory initiatives. While it was developed partly in cooperation with a five-member expert team hired by the World Bank and led by Alaska's former governor Steve Cowper (Seibert, 2008), there was also a group of high-powered US lawyers working pro bono for the Columbia University team. The latter collaborated with local lawyers in designing a made-to-measure oil law, drawing on best practices and worst experiences encountered elsewhere. Some of the participating Santomean lawyers I spoke to described this process not as an imposition but as a careful negotiation of different possible models (US, Norwegian, etc.) from which they picked whatever elements seemed most appropriate to them.

The resource-revenue law is often invoked as the prime mechanism that will help STP avoid the rent seeking, inflation, and corruption that trouble other oil-rich developing countries. A final draft was passed by the Santomean parliament in 2004. The law now sets out how oil revenues are to be spent; that a part should be saved in a future-generations fund with the US Federal Reserves; ¹⁵ that a committee of people has to approve any withdrawals to be made from this account; and that there should be an oversight commission controlling how the money is used. The Santomean legislation is now held up as a model case for other African countries (Bell and Maurea Faria, 2007), superior even to that governing the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, which did not seem to withhold the pressure of national politics (Massey and May, 2005; Pegg, 2005).

In a much-cited book, the anthropologist James Ferguson (1990) speaks of development as an ‘anti-politics machine’, unresponsive to the politics that shape a country's society and economy. The National Petroleum Agency and the resource revenue management law may similarly be seen to be the kind of evacuation of politics by managerialism, which Ferguson notes. Politics, in the self-consciously technocratic replies of my Agency interlocutors, was happening elsewhere. It could be ignored or, preferably, displaced by technical solutions. Though not inaccurate, this formulation presumes a rather limited scope of where politics happens and how (Barry, 2001).

Entities such as STP's Petroleum Agency embody new lines of accountability and types of relevant expertise, technical capacities and ethical comportment, which are also penned into the national resource revenue management law. In some sense, uncertainty about a future with oil has led the technical and the political to intersect in such governmental structures. At the same time, politicized discussion about STP's oil continues. For example, doubt has remained as to the effectiveness of certain governance initiatives, including the oil agency and the legislation, even as many people thoroughly welcome their existence. Questions about who should have a say in decision-making processes related to oil, about the accountability of those involved, or about the ways in which oil money will be spent, have persisted (or perhaps gained even more salience) and are widely discussed in Santomean restaurants, offices, banks, newspapers, and online forums. They include procedural, managerial, or administrative questions that also raise assessments of right and wrong. Beyond these specific questions thus looms a larger issue. As I discuss in the following section, what is being scrutinized is, quite simply, how people should orient themselves towards a future with oil.

Temporal dispositions

The proliferation of anticipation strategies in relation to new types of technology and scientific knowledge has been commented on by sociologists and anthropologists, particularly in situations where potentials and implications are unclear and perhaps hardly predictable (Adams et al., 2009). More specifically, security measures and preparedness apparatuses aim to bring disaster to life in order to detect, and enable us to get ready for, what is to come (Cooper, 2006; Lakoff, 2008; Samimiam-Darash, 2013). Shelters, ostensibly built in response to risk, are concretizations and transformations of that from which they are to protect (Deville et al., this volume). These studies have broadened the scope of anticipation to include not just discourses about the future but practices, technologies, and material devices that, it is hoped, will allow people to encounter, act on and shape the future in specific ways. In doing so, anticipation brings unknown or uncertain futures into the present. Similarly, the programmes, laws and institutions implemented in anticipation of STP's oil - from the National Petroleum Agency to the mobilization of civil society discussed below - are, in a sense, effects of disaster that is yet to come. They are anticipatory strategies designed to enhance the robustness of state and societal institutions and to allow them to cope with any economic vagaries that might come their way. In this sense, anticipation (en)acts disaster in advance.

In examining how the prerequisite for anticipation is articulated, I draw attention to the ways that anticipation guides a collective and individual temporal reorientation vis-à-vis the disastrous matter of STP's oil. Anticipation desires to displace other modes of engaging the future, which are deemed somewhat deficient. I want to highlight the specificity of anticipation as an affective state briefly, by way of contrast. ¹⁶ The contrast is between anticipation and other types of future orientation, namely speculating and waiting. In my conversations with Santomeans and foreign commentators and observers, waiting and speculating were recurrently identified as two prevalent modes of engaging a future with oil. And both of them were considered problematic. ¹⁷

Speculation is said to be the temporal disposition from which Santomean oil has sprung, ever since the signing of first contracts between ERHC and the Santomean government in 1997. Particularly foreign investors, local politicians and members of the Santomean elite have been considered prone to engaging in speculations of all kinds. They are accused of conjuring riches out of thin air without taking any visible steps towards getting oil out of the ground. Their speculating seems to have kept oil in a state of indeterminacy and, by creating unwarranted expectations at home and abroad, risks contributing to future resource disaster. Waiting is quite different. International agency staff and Santomeans themselves tended to describe waiting to me as the first reaction to the announcement of oil among the population at large. Waiting has been equated with a passive leaning back, a disengagement from all productive activity in expectation of large sums of oil money. This attitude of alleged inactivity was considered detrimental to the country's development, and could similarly be seen as exacerbating the effects of the resource curse. By contrast, to anticipate is to substitute fresh certainties and uncertainties about what oil might bring for those produced by speculation and waiting. It generates a sense of urgency and need for action. In doing so, it cultivates a dynamic, responsible sense of self - a self that relates to oil in a rational, informed, and non-selfish manner. Anticipating is also to grasp the implications of individual actions for the attainment (or non-attainment) of ‘long-term’ futures (cf. Guyer, 2007).

I suggest that an ability to differentiate between these types of temporal orientation implied by waiting, speculation and anticipation, is central to the politics of disaster yet to come. I want to illustrate this process by exploring the work carried out by NGOs campaigning for transparency in the resource sector. Specifically I look at the mobilization of civil society, which has been key to this project. As the entity that would be capable of demanding disclosure and the fair distribution of resource revenues, civil society has been attributed a vital role as counter-force to corrupt governments and powerful industry players. As Humphreys et al. put it, for example:

Civil society is projected as an entity held together not just by shared discourses of transparency and accountability, but also by shared ways of knowing and worrying about the future, which provoke collective attachments. It moreover implicates a particular kind of subject constituting herself knowledgeably and responsibly in relation to potentially disastrous oil.

In October 2007, the NGO Publish What You Pay (PWYP) and the London-based NGO International Alert convened a ‘National Discussion of Oil-Revenue Management’ in STP. While PWYP provides a global network for civil society groups campaigning for transparency and accountability in the natural resource sector, International Alert specializes in conflict resolution and peace building. For some years, International Alert had been running a local office in STP implementing a diverse set of projects, including several oil-related training sessions for civil society activists and parliamentarians, a centre for local journalists, and two independent community radio stations. The 2007 National Discussion received further support from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and UNICEF and a range of organizations that have been leading in this field of activism, among them Global Witness, Revenue Watch, the Open Society Institute, and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad). It was opened by STP's president, Fradique de Menezes, and included staff of the National Petroleum Agency, the local representative of Chevron Texaco, the president of STP's federation of NGOs (FONG), as well as a founding member of Webeto, a Santomean NGO operating out of the Portuguese diaspora, which had called for increasing transparency in STP's oil sector already since 2003. ¹⁸ Among the participants were activists from other Lusophone African countries as well as Nigeria (with which STP shares a joint development zone).

As members of Santomean civil society were invited to exchange their experiences, and staff at the National Petroleum Agency explained how much oil STP might have and how it was governed, and the representatives of International Alert, Global Witness, and the World Bank outlined the benefits of joining a regulatory initiative, such as the EITI, they were tracing the outlines of STP's resource disaster in a number of ways.

First, with its international audience and the aim to multiply networks across the region, the National Discussion performed the disaster as a problem with global reach. Importantly, this was not the first and not the last event of this kind in STP. A previous workshop entitled ‘Living with Oil’ had been held in 2005, and another followed in 2010. A lively interchange of ideas, tools, documents, and experiences linked past and present events, and some of the people there would have also participated in one or another meeting held in Cameroon, South Africa, Germany, or Norway. This afforded multiple connections around a common cause. When a few weeks later I visited Ana, an energetic and outspoken woman in her thirties from Príncipe (the smaller of the two islands) and one of the participants in the National Discussion, she told me enthusiastically about the email exchanges that had followed: not only with the leaders of other Santomean NGOs, but also Matteo from Revenue Watch in Gabon, Elias from the Open Society Institute in Angola, and Carla from Webeto in Portugal. For her, these exchanges were hugely important in organizing her own NGO that she had founded to take up the cause of oil. These people, she surmised, living and working outside the country could provide her with better access to information.

Second, the National Discussion revealed a lack of transparency and thus reinforced the need to disseminate ‘best practices’ and ‘share lessons’. In other words, it exposed vulnerabilities that would then justify certain interventions (Lakoff, 2008). The event reminded people of the uncomfortable truth of oil in STP. As José - an experienced civil society activist, participant of many meetings in Gabon, Cameroon and South Africa, and a some time representative of PWYP in STP - summed it up in a subsequent conversation: Oil was prone to bring conflict because the flow of money deriving from oil, just like oil itself, was so easily channelled, diverted or blocked. Similarly, in his opening speech, President de Menezes did not hesitate to spell out the difficulties that had been encountered due to what he described as a lack of experience and capacity. The report summarizing the event's results highlighted the ‘nebulousness’ surrounding oil in STP, the ‘confusion’ among citizens, the ‘lack of clarity’, and the absence of detailed information from the website of the JDA, the authority that managed and, in theory, was obliged to report on issues pertaining to the joint development zone (International Alert et al., 2007). ¹⁹ It was this obscurity on which participants in the event were to act.

Third, the National Discussion anticipated the existence of Santomean civil society itself, which paradoxically was claimed to be largely absent. In our conversations, local and international NGO staff lamented about the weakness and lack of commitment of the non-governmental sector in a small country like STP. For many people, it was thought, NGO work was just another source of income rather than an expression of loyalty to the cause. More training and capacity-building would partly remedy this situation; another strategy was to learn from other countries. This sentiment was reflected in what Carlos, a young journalist from Príncipe, told me about an educational trip to Norway in which he had participated. Organized by International Alert, the trip had been intended to give members of Santomean civil society - including journalists, business leaders, and NGO activists - an opportunity to get to know, first hand a model oil state and a country that has benefited from its oil wealth while avoiding the resource curse. ²⁰ Now, Carlos expressed his wholehearted admiration for what he had encountered: a strong and organized civil society that had a true presence in public debates about the distribution of oil revenues. ‘There,’ Carlos noted, ‘civil society meets, discusses and has a forum where problems are discussed, where one can object, and that's crucial.’

Fourth, events such as the National Discussion and other training opportunities compelled a desire to do something. Being prepared, becoming active and holding the government to account (responsibilizar) were recurrent themes in my conversations with self-declared civil society members. It was about developing a certain consciousness, Ana explained to me in our conversation. As she put it, people would not be able to find the solution to life's perennial problems, from poverty and malnutrition to ill health, which they so desperately required, by simply waiting with folded arms for oil to arrive. The desire to implicate oneself in the future with oil is captured well in the online publications of Webeto, the diaspora NGO. Incidentally, the NGO's name is taken from uê beto, an expression in Santomean Creole, which translates as ‘open eyes’. Indeed, Webeto sought to encourage people to open their eyes:

Becoming an auditing agent and campaigning for transparency: this was about how to develop a specific disposition towards a future with oil. A conversation I had with Mohamed, the West Africa manager of International Alert, was telling in this regard. He explained to me that while International Alert's work was founded on the premise that there was an indisputable link between natural resources (especially oil) and conflict, it was important to them that they had found this view reflected in Santomean people's assessments of the situation. There already seemed to exist local awareness of this connection. This was a type of consciousness that would be vital to their successful work. Not that Santomeans predicted imminent social conflict, Mohamed clarified, but they saw it as a possibility.

These examples illustrate some of the methods for discernment between waiting, speculation, and anticipation, which were being nurtured in the ‘not yet’ of STP's resource disaster. People like Ana, José and Carlos found themselves addressed as potential exemplary subjects, cultivating an affective state from which to engage STP's potentially ‘cursed’ oil. The report on the 2007 National Discussion also contained some more concrete instructions. Seeking knowledge, demanding information, taking initiative, having a vision, uniting one's efforts, expecting to face obstacles, setting up an EITI committee, developing work plans, devising audits, and sticking to deadlines - those are the things that can be done in anticipation of a resource curse (International Alert et al., 2007). Task lists of this kind index a complex temporality that ‘punctuates’ (Guyer, 2007) or makes more ‘manageable’ what might otherwise be seen as an ill-defined process of individual and collective transformation.

As Adams et al. (2009:248) poignantly put it, anticipation occasions the sense that ‘regardless of whether disasters actually come to pass, they have already had their impact on our present lives’. For the people addressed as Santomean civil society in the National Discussion, the parliamentarians instructed in proper conduct by international consultants, or the journalists who were taught reporting techniques in International Alert's journalist centre, this was indeed true. Instead of speculating on the arrival of oil, or simply waiting for something to happen, people were given the resources that would enable them to engage the ‘not yet’ of resource disaster. They would apprehend oil afresh, be suspicious of the unfounded promises made by their leaders, ask the right questions, critically reflect on the information offered to them, and also act as multipliers of this stance in their own communities. They would not just expect STP's double-edged future to arrive, but implicate themselves in the job of securing an adequate management of oil as potentially disastrous matter. They would thus contribute to the country's economic stability and ultimately to the prevention of the resource curse. In forming new temporal orientations towards, and attachments with, oil, they would start living in the ‘not yet’ of resource disaster to come.

Anticipation's excess

My analysis to this point may be taken to indicate that STP's future has been largely predetermined, leaving it poised between two extremes: prosperous oil state vs. a place shattered by the impact of resource disaster. I may have given the impression that this is a world where people transform themselves into anticipating automatons in order to avoid becoming either greedy rent-seekers or hopelessly impoverished and disenfranchised individuals. However, I want to suggest something further about the incompleteness of anticipation. This incompleteness stems only partly from the fact that new knowledge is constantly being produced, throwing into doubt the precarious certainties we have carved out of uncertain terrains (Samimiam-Darash, 2013: 5), though its effects are similar.

Going beyond this reading of uncertainty, I point instead to an excess of anticipation, not unlike the atmosphere of indagation described by Tironi (this volume). That is, the emergence of all kinds of suspicions, which have as their object anticipation itself and thus seem to place its full achievement always slightly out of reach.

In a phone call made around the time that the 2007 National Discussion was taking place in S. Tomé, the Santomean President put the following accusation to one of the leading figures of NGO Webeto: Might not all that talk about oil and about the need to manage supposedly large sums of revenues generate false expectations among the Santomean population? The president's accusation thus raised the paradoxical (and somewhat misplaced) question whether the well-intended work of Webeto and other NGOs could inadvertently contribute to creating conditions favourable to an oil curse. This suspicion might seem to echo my own earlier interpretation of the NGO advocacy work as a performance of yet-to-come resource disaster. However, it could also be seen as itself a result of the politics of anticipation put in place in STP.

Although suspicion frequently invokes empirical underpinnings, it is not simply caused by the failure or shortcomings of the objects to which it pertains. For example, in 2005, International Alert found itself publicly accused of embezzlement and undue profiteering as the result of a dispute with the Santomean union of journalists. The union, which from the start had been one of the primary beneficiaries of the journalists' centre funded by International Alert, demanded that it be given exclusive access rights to the facility. Its leaders claimed that the union was the rightful representative of all Santomean journalists and should, therefore, be in charge. While the suspicions about these alleged misdemeanours were soon dispelled, they did temporarily upset International Alert's relation with its local partners.

‘Suspicions amongst thoughts, are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight’, wrote Francis Bacon in 1625. It might be suggested that suspicions such as those levelled against International Alert were simply part of the fabric of Santomean sociality where rumour and gossip abound. Anthropologist Gerhard Seibert (2006), for example, explains the persistence of rumours that are spread through anonymous political pamphlets in STP, particularly in the 1990s, in reference to the context of African societies, characterized by oral traditions and a lack of literacy, and the limits on free speech during STP's one-party regime lasting through the late 1970s and 1980s, as well as the limited access to trustworthy news and information due to a lack of appropriate media. The flipside of this assumption would be that nagging suspicions could be made to disappear with greater knowledge, information, and transparency.

However, suspicion is perhaps not so much external to transparency, or its opposite, as implicated in it. The suspicion that power does not always operate in the open is at the heart of discourses on transparency, such as those promoted to prevent STP's resource disaster (cf. Sanders and West, 2003). More specifically, in his analysis of contemporary practices of transparency in the oil industry, Andrew Barry (2013) has demonstrated how the production of information may lead to a change in the conceptual nature of that which is considered valuable and therefore to be kept secret. Paradoxically, proliferating information thus seems to increase rather than reduce the number of secrets that need to be revealed (see also Mair et al., 2012).

Something similar to this process was hinted at by a member of staff of the Public Information Office (Gabinete de Registo de Informação Pública) set up to archive and publicize information about STP's oil. When we spoke not long after the Office's inauguration in 2008, this man voiced doubt about whether the Office team would be able to achieve the goal they had been set. The intention was that, in the future, citizens would be able to come to the Office, demand to see contracts or reports, and learn about the amount of money the country had received from signature bonuses and revenues. However, despite repeated enquiries and requests, he claimed, the Office still had not received all the relevant documents, for example those referring to the joint development zone with Nigeria, the country's most prominent zone of oil-related activity. These documents, he seemed to imply, were being held back on purpose.

However, consider the additional twist to this observation offered by António, a self-conscious member of Santomean civil society in a conversation we had in late 2012. I had told António about my earlier attempts to receive oil-related documents from the Public Information Office when I was informed that the scanner needed to make copies had broken down and that ‘some missing part’ had not yet been supplied. António was unsurprised and did not think that the scanner was just a feeble excuse. People working in the Office might simply not quite understand their own role, he explained; they did not feel the urgency to get all the information out. But then, António speculated that the Office's director might indeed have an interest in not revealing all available information. Information that is out there for everyone - that is public - doesn't give you any power, António explained. But hiding information, having information that others don't have, is what makes you powerful.

António's observations echo analyses of the conceptual contradictions of regimes of free information, such as those promoted in the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (Fortun and Fortun, 1999). While ‘perfect information’ may have come to be considered a key factor in creating perfect markets, promoters of transparency tend to romanticize information. They forget that information has become a commodity in itself, a limited and necessarily carefully guarded good. Yet, in some sense similar to the SEC bureaucrats, members of Santomean civil society continue to ‘pursue the promise of information as a social good, knowing full well that the utopian desire to be “in the know” can never be fulfilled’ (Fortun and Fortun, 1999: 190).

The suspicions voiced in the above examples do not simply occur in the context of STP's anticipatory activities; they have as their object the very forms and terms that are constitutive of anticipation - be that the alleged misappropriation of money by the advocacy NGO or the official's apparent disregard for legal requirements to provide the conditions for transparency (i.e. a functioning scanner). That is, they do not indicate a failure that could be explained by a lack of anticipation (in the sense discussed earlier) or by faulty procedure. Rather such suspicions are, in some sense, an important index of anticipation itself, which in its particular orientation to the future encourages a kind of questioning stance that it shares with suspicion. Both suspicion and anticipation partly rely on what people already know from experience and what seems likely to repeat itself in the future; but while anticipation is bound to rely on information or ‘facts’, suspicion makes do with perhaps less certain items of knowledge. (Of course, what confers factuality and what doesn't is also up for grabs.) Suspicion, in this sense, cannot readily be regulated away or eliminated through more numerous revelations. Rather, like Barry's secrets, suspicion occasionally appears to be multiplied by efforts to control it (Barry, 2013).

What are the implications of these anticipatory excesses that happen when efforts to anticipate become themselves suspect? I suggest they open up some of the faultlines of the anticipatory regime, of its conditions of possibility, of anticipation's ethics, which get readily overlooked. For who would object to the project of preventing disaster that is yet to come? A last example will suffice. The 2007 National Discussion had been surrounded by some disagreement regarding the implementation of another, or rather two other, Santomean anticipatory devices. The first device was a local committee for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) mentioned earlier. The second was an Oversight Commission that, like the Public Information Office, was stipulated by STP's oil revenue management law. Although an independent campaign, the EITI has received much support from the World Bank in an effort to guarantee what is deemed good governance in the extractive industries sector. In STP, the process of setting up an EITI committee was run by the Ministry of Natural Resources; while the eleven members of the Oversight Commission were to be selected by the parliamentary committee in charge of oil matters.

While meetings were being held, candidates put forward, and work plans drafted, a convoluted discussion ensued, involving international NGO representatives and World Bank advisors, local civil society, and government. The focus of their disagreement was the appropriate relationship between the two entities. Would they be duplicating each other's work? Would the expense of having two bodies with similar functions be justified? Would one be better designed than the other to do the job at hand? Which would be more readily dominated by government interests? Which would better represent the will of civil society and the Santomean population at large? In contrast to the EITI committee, which would consist of civil society, government, and oil companies with equal representation and weight, the Oversight Commission was to be composed exclusively of local actors; three of them would be civil society and the remaining would be drawn from a range of government institutions, including parliament, tribunal and presidency. Although both entities were to have an auditing function, each was also conceived to have a distinctive remit: the Oversight Commission was to watch over government expenditure only while the EITI committee was to create accountability between all three stakeholder groups.

As a simple merger between the two bodies seemed out of the question (after all, this would violate Santomean state law), suspicions about the entities' real purposes and politics could be heard. While a home-grown oversight body might seem preferable, the EITI would be a better conduit for transparent external pressure. At the same time, the Oversight Commission was also readily manipulable by political interests and could become a mere front of transparency, and an EITI committee pushed by the World Bank as a mechanism for ‘naming and shaming’ could be something to which governments were inclined to sign up only tokenistically. In other words, both of them or neither could work as a mechanism to avoid a resource curse.

While these debates were being held about the modalities of STP's compliance to local and international transparency standards, and work on the EITI committee was well under way in 2007 and 2008, by 2010 this work had ground to an abrupt halt. The country was officially divested of its candidate status. The reason cited for the decision was a lack of progress, principally the failure to meet certain deadlines. Some observers readily saw this as signalling a lack of commitment to transparency on the part of the Santomean government. In other words, it could only be interpreted as a refusal to anticipate. Adherence to deadlines and dates that frame the process for EITI candidature becomes a measure for sincerity of a will to be transparent. Conversely, the failure to meet such deadlines can be read as defiance, and as yet another step towards an impending resource disaster. In the ‘not yet’ of resource disaster, the date (STP's unmet EITI deadline) became exemplary of what Jane Guyer appositely refers to as ‘signal event moments in near-future time at which the whole world could change’ (2007:417).

Conclusion

The whole world did not change with STP's temporary expulsion from the EITI process. Two years later, the country had been readmitted and a new committee had been installed, now chaired by José who, when we talked in late 2012, was already projecting a possible future for himself in the international career structure of the EITI. While items on task lists and deadlines mark and break up the near future into small chunks, this process is interwoven with the cyclical time frames embedded in systems of global governance; and hopes for a personal long term may give new purpose by implicating oneself in the pursuing of the macroeconomic long term. The complex enfolding of multiple temporalities seems to me characteristic of, or even compulsory to, the ‘not yet’ of disaster as a project that posits both the existence of a desirable long term as well as its undesirable, disastrous alternative, and suggests steps on the way to prevent such disaster from happening. With the methods of anticipation, any strict distinctions between the present, the near and the long-term future collapse.

In exploring the ‘not yet’ of disaster as a temporality in which disaster has effects in the present, prior to - or rather in anticipation of - its occurrence, this article has thrown up some pertinent questions about when disasters start. We have seen that for resource curse theorists, disaster would seem to start with the hopes and expectations that people entertain some time before, or independently of, the start of commercial oil extraction. I am tempted to trace it back even further to other disastrous moments many million years ago. This was when, for reasons scientists today seek to reveal, oceans entered an extended state of oxygen starvation, or anoxia, while atmospheric and oceanic temperatures increased rather noticeably for the numerous organisms that were extinguished as a consequence. Intrusions of molten rock into older organic-rich shales likely released the greenhouse gases that triggered what geologists now call Oceanic Anoxic Events (OAEs), notably the Toarcian OAE nearly 200 million years ago and the Cenomanian Turonian OAE about a hundred million years later. Layer upon layer of phytoplanktonic organic matter began to accumulate on a scale much greater than usual, squashed, intensely heated up, and transformed first into a waxy substance, and then into liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons.

I offer this juxtaposition of possible, though as such also fictive, starting moments of resource disaster partly as a reminder of a question I posed earlier in this article. Do we think of disasters as natural or social events, as hybrid, or as in fact generative of precisely those kinds of distinctions? How can we, as social scientists, conceptualize and describe the possible ‘ontological impact of volatile earth processes’ (Clark 2011: 84)? Explanations of the seemingly detrimental effects of natural resources on their ‘host’ countries, as we have seen, have moved the focus to social and political factors, rather than assuming what has been criticized as resource determinism. In this article, I have tried to make explicit the methods entailed in this process, as well as the important ontological conversions involved: for example, from oil as a substance that is itself the product of geological disaster into a fungible commodity and a money equivalent circulating on multiple scales. Resource economics, as Tim Mitchell (2009) notes, has almost exclusively preoccupied itself with the latter, thereby overlooking its very material framings and political effects. By contrast, what I have sought to show here is how oil that is potentially disastrous is also politically productive. It becomes a new matter of concern with its own specific temporal framing.

This article has aimed to sketch how anticipation prompts a disaster yet to come. It trailed the emergence of a particular temporal politics in the expectation of future oil in São Tomé and Príncipe - two islands that, in the eyes of many observers, seem destined by their geographic, cultural, and political connections to experience both the best and the worst of what resource wealth can bring. The assumption that natural resource development, especially where hydrocarbons are involved, can have potentially disastrous consequences for its host nations has had remarkable effects not just in STP, but indeed worldwide. Sociologists and anthropologists studying science and technology have now for some time drawn attention to the ways in which certain epistemic practices including those of economists, political scientists, and international policy makers as well as their own - are co-constitutive of the phenomena they purport to describe. Here, I have focused less on scientific knowledge production per se than on its extensions within intermediary (and not so intermediary) global agencies and organizations. Indeed, I would argue that such bodies are particularly instrumental in effecting articulations of economic, social, or political knowledge within specific locales.

The anticipation of yet-to-come resource disaster is thus not a unitary or predetermined project. In my analysis, it involves broader logics and the micromanagement of individual practices, long-term perspectives, and short-term goals. It involves individuals and institutions who, for a wide variety of reasons, both readily embrace and occasionally eschew what anticipation has to offer them as an affective state oriented towards a possibly dangerous and disastrous future. Anticipation is entangled, on the one hand, with the logics of what Barry (2006) calls a technological zone that seeks to encompass the contemporary oil industry, and that is itself an assemblage of technical devices, standards, practices, personnel, and so on. On the other hand, as Barry also points out, it is capable of bringing with it its own limitations and apparent failures that may not be fully recognized by those who foster its implementation and expansion. This suggests a somewhat different perspective on governance and disaster management, a perspective that directs our attention to what I have described as questions of incompleteness and excess.

The elaborate anticipatory apparatus implemented in STP with the aim of keeping potentially cursed matter under control and preventing future resource disaster has itself generated a series of effects in the present. These include not only the multiple entities charged with managing oil but also fresh suspicions and uncertainties regarding the operations of anticipation itself. I discussed the emergence of new types of contestations and of concerns about anticipation's form and functions, including the worry that if anticipation is not carried out properly, it may itself introduce uncertainties that contribute to the resource curse. The question is how this type of uncertainty, generated in the context of prevention or preparation, can itself be managed. Suspicion is thus not the flipside of anticipation or its target in any simplistic way. Suspicion is something that is implicated in the diverse practices of anticipation and it may even call the project into doubt, thus redirecting anticipation against itself.