In the Making and Unmaking of Statehood. An Exploration of how the State and Petroleum Corporations Negotiate over the Generation of Socio-economic Development in Tanzania

Abstract This article explores how the state and transnational oil and gas corporations negotiate over socio-economic development in Tanzania. It focuses on how public–private and local–global boundaries are in constant reconfiguration between the actors. The article responds to two shortcomings in previous literature on corporate social responsibility, governments and development. First, state agency and power in the global South have been overlooked when the prevailing focus of research has been on community–business relations. Secondly, when states have been addressed, they have commonly been understood either as deviations from a Weberian, ‘modern’ state or as allied with corporate interests. This article departs from these approaches and analyses state–business relations through a focus on discourses and practices that make and unmake statehood. Building on the ‘negotiating statehood’ framework, the analysis focuses on the actors, repertoires, resources and modes of governance in the negotiation over development. The analysis shows how corporate-driven development becomes deeply entangled in the making of statehood, even if the corporate approach revolves around unmaking and improving statehood.


Introduction
Since the turn of the century, private corporations have taken up new forms of agency within development cooperation (Blowfield and Dolan, 2014). These new roles of corporations as development agents through corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities have gained broad cross-disciplinary research interest ranging from anthropology to management studies (Blowfield, 2012;Dolan and Rajak, 2016;Jeppesen and Lund-Thomsen, 2010;Utting, 2007). Several scholars have criticised the possibilities of corporations to genuinely generate development (Frynas, 2005;Jenkins, 2005). CSR interventions have been claimed to be underpinned by a neoliberal epistemology (Shamir, 2008), to neglect structural reasons of poverty (Blowfield, 2005) and to create new relations of dependency (Rajak, 2011;Welker, 2014). In response, efforts have been made to propose alternatives for how CSR practices could be improved in order to respond to the needs of people in the global South (e.g. Banks et al., 2016;Newell and Frynas, 2007;Prieto-Carrón et al., 2006).
Research on the agency and power of states in this context remains limited. It has been common to both the practice and research on CSR in the global South to focus on corporations' relations with communities (Banks et al., 2016;Idemudia and Ite, 2006;Muthuri et al, 2008;Prieto-Carrón et al., 2006;Rajak, 2016) or, less frequently, on government-community relations in governing private investments (Poncian, 2021). In the latter strain of research, the state, and more precisely the ruling elites, has commonly been considered to be closely allied with investors, which has made the attainment of justice for communities difficult, if not impossible. This has been common especially in the context of natural resources, particularly in studies located in Nigeria (Idemudia, 2010;Watts, 2005;Zalik, 2004).
Recently, calls for a stronger focus on states in CSR research have been made across disciplines (Knudsen et al., 2020;Kourula et al, 2019). The role of states from the global North in relation to CSR has been quite widely explored (Albareda et al., 2007;Knudsen and Moon, 2017;Lange and Wyndham, 2021). The role of states in the global South, while less researched, has been explored, for example, in light of recent regulation on CSR in Asia and Africa (Gatti et al., 2018;Hayk, 2019;Jayaraman et al., 2018). However, research on the relations between states from the global South and (northern) corporations engaging in CSR remains scarce.
In order to address this scarcity, this article focuses on state-business relations and draws from theoretical approaches to statehood that highlight the importance of analysing practice-oriented and discourse-based dimensions of states. These relational approaches emphasise that the boundaries between state and society, public and private and local and global are blurry and in a constant process of negotiation (e.g. Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011;Jessop, 2016;Lund, 2006;Migdal, 2001). These boundaries are also in a constant making through what could be described as boundary work (Mitchell, 1991;1999;Thelen et al., 2014). Understanding statehood as a process allows for a more open-ended and non-binary analysis of how states and corporations interact and how statehood is made by different actors in a variety of locations in relation to CSR. Building on Hagmann and Péclard's (2010) framework of 'negotiating statehood', this article describes the actors involved in 'negotiating' and analyses the repertoires, resources and practices that the state and large transnational oil and gas corporations, respectively, deploy to generate development in Tanzania. Based on this approach, the following research question is addressed in this article: In which ways are the boundaries between the state and gas corporations (a) made and (b) blurred when the state and gas corporations negotiate over the aims and practices of socio-economic development?
This article is structured as follows: the first section presents the analytical framework that serves as a lens for studying how development is negotiated between the Tanzanian state and petroleum corporations. After presenting the methodology and describing the actors engaged in the negotiations, the analysis focuses on the repertoires, resources and governance modes that are deployed by the government and the corporations. This article concludes by discussing how corporate-driven development becomes deeply entangled in the making of statehood, even if the corporate approach revolves around unmaking and improving statehood.

Doing the state
To analyse the interaction between corporations and the state in the realm of socioeconomic development, this article deploys a relational approach. This approach differs significantly from many previous approaches especially within management studies, where 'the state' has usually implicitly or explicitly been mirrored against a Weberian, 'modern' state and any deviations from this ideal type have been considered to be limitations of statehood that corporations have the potential to 'fill in' through CSR. Examples of this mirroring are the frequently used terms 'institutional void' and 'limited statehood' to describe states in CSR research (Adeleye et al., 2020;Amaeshi et al., 2016;Börzel et al., 2012;Jamali and Karam, 2018;Nwoke, 2021).
The analytical approach of this article is inspired by state-related research by anthropologists and sociologists. Anthropologists have generally focused on the interaction between state and society and the formal and informal in everyday practices of statehood (e.g. Gupta, 1995;Lund, 2006;Migdal, 2001;Migdal and Schlichte, 2005;Thelen et al., 2014). Political sociologists have theorised the state as a social relation, reflecting changing balances of forces (within capitalism) in society and the wider natural and social environment (Jessop, 2016) and also analysed interactions between 'the global' and 'the local' (e.g. Abrahamsen and Williams, 2011;Sassen, 2002).
These approaches are united by the idea that boundaries between state and society, public and private, formal and informal, and local and global are blurry and in ongoing negotiation and reconfiguration. In this blurry context, statehood is constantly made through practices and discourses that reproduce a separation between these different spheres (Mitchell, 1991;1999, see also Thelen et al., 2014). For example, discourses of sovereignty demark boundaries to the international and discourses of stateness are concerned with demarking boundaries within the domestic political community (Dunn, 2010).
This article is based on the premise that state actors do boundary work to produce a separation not only between state and society, but also between the state and other governing non-state actors, in this case, private companies. This is crucial in spaces in the global South where non-state actors have exercised domination for centuries and still continue to do so (Ferguson, 2005;Ferguson and Gupta, 2002). Especially areas where natural resources are extracted have become sites of high levels of 'stateness' because they are sites where struggles of economic survival and political elite reproduction are intense (Soares de Oliveira, 2007). In these sites, states and corporations have negotiated at least over the responsibility to provide services and 'development' (Appel, 2012;Welker, 2014).
This article, with its focus on state-corporate relations, looks particularly at public-private and global-local boundaries, at how they are made on one hand and become blurry on the other. To further concretise the approach, the analysis draws on Hagmann and Péclard's (2010) 'negotiating statehood' framework, which has been built based on scholarship on African statehood in particular. This framework proposes a focus on 'by whom and how state domination is fashioned ("actors, resources, repertoires"), where these processes take place ("negotiation arenas and tables") and what the main outcomes and issues at stake are ("objects of negotiation")' (p. 544). By 'resources' the authors refer to the material bases of collective action, ranging from bureaucratic capacities to finance and technical expertise. 'Repertoires', on the other hand, refer to how state domination is practiced through 'oral and written discourses, combined with modes of communication ranging from gestures to music and clothing' (p. 547). 'Negotiation arenas' describe abstract political spaces in which actors are included or excluded from negotiating and 'negotiation tables' refer to formalised settings where invited actors are invited to negotiate. In this article, this framework is applied to analyse by whom and how both state and corporate domination is fashioned in the negotiation arena of socio-economic development.
While the negotiating statehood framework provides a helpful lens to study statecorporate relations, it is quite unspecific on what is meant by 'resources'. A focus, for example, on bureaucratic capacities narrows the possibilities of identifying corresponding resources that non-state actors have in the negotiation. Thus, to analyse the resources of the actors, I complement the framework with an additional analytic. This is Bourdieu's framework on 'forms of capital' (Bourdieu, 1986). Bourdieu's work on different forms of capital, including his work around states' meta-capital derives from analyses of individuals and institutions, as well as of European statehood. Despite these European origins, for the purposes of this article, the framework enables a multidimensional perspective on how power is practiced in the boundaries between the public and the private as well as the local and the global.
Bourdieu's framework is based on the idea that capital has three main forms: economic, cultural and social. Economic capital means material wealth in different forms, cultural capital refers to knowledge and information, and social capital to the actual and potential resources that are linked to membership in a certain group or network. All these forms are linked to symbolic capital, which refers to accumulated prestige and honour. Symbolic capital exists only in relation to all other forms of capital because they become symbolic capital when they are perceived by social agents to have value (Bourdieu, 1986). Furthermore, Bourdieu (1994) has argued that states possess particular forms of capital. Their symbolic capital is derived from recognised authority, which leads to the concentration of all forms of capital within the state and constitutes the state as the holder of a form of 'meta-capital' granting power over other forms of capital and over their holders. States' symbolic capital does not rest solely on collective recognition but is objectified, codified and bureaucratised and, according to Bourdieu, forms a particular kind of juridical capital. In addition, states' cultural capital consists especially of informational capital, where information is concentrated and redistributed to reach cultural and linguistic unification and construct a national identity (Bourdieu, 1994). In this article, Bourdieu's framework is used to analyse how the state and the petroleum corporations have mobilised economic, cultural, social, symbolic and meta-capital to mark the public-private and local-global boundary.
Finally, in order to understand how power is practiced in the societies adjacent to the studied investment area, I analyse the modes of governance that the state and the corporations respectively deploy. This part of the analysis is inspired by Foucault's (1991) work on governmentality and particularly the concept's focus on what actors intend to change or maintain and what techniques they apply for it to happen. Concretely, in the last section of the analysis, I compare how state actors and corporations govern over people and how these governing rationalities differ or become entangled. To summarise, the analysis is structured around actors, repertoires, resources as forms of capital, and modes of governance.

Materials and methods
This article is based on a qualitative study of petroleum investments in Southern Tanzania that combines semi-structured interviews and written, secondary sources. The secondary sources include eight natural resource sector legislation acts and policies between 2013 and 2017 1 , newspaper articles in one of Tanzania's national newspapers, The Citizen, and petroleum corporations' CSR marketing brochures. In addition, the material includes participatory observation in two workshops organised by NGOs in 2018. The research was initiated in 2015. The interviews have been conducted in 2018, followed by three update interviews with government, village and NGO representatives, and an NGO roundtable in 2022. The newspaper articles range between 2016 and 2020. For the purpose of the research, clearance was obtained from the Tanzanian Commission of Science and Technology (COSTECH). 2 The research has been conducted during the presidency of the late John Pombe Magufuli and his era in power is reflected in the analysis. In this period, Tanzania took an authoritarian turn (Paget, 2017) and the research topic was considered politically sensitive by most informants. All interviewees have therefore been granted confidentiality and citations are not attributed to specific people or organisations.
Snowballing was used as a tactic (Noy, 2008) to access and identify interviewees who were relevant actors for this study. Snowballing was necessary for gaining trustamong the interviewees. Initial interviews were acquired through the author's existing contacts mainly within internationally connected Tanzanian NGOs. The study includes 51 semi-structured interviews with a total of 80 people. Of all interviews, 16 have been conducted with persons who represent the government either as officials, ruling party members or both. They range from directors in government institutions to village level officials and include both central and local government authorities. In addition, representatives of four investors, including Equinor, Shell, ExxonMobil and Ophir Energy, have been interviewed. These interviews have been held with 10 people in total, including country directors, staff from sustainability units, a government affairs manager and a legal officer. The interviewees also include organisations that have funded or implemented the corporations' development activities or been involved in capacity building or advocacy related to petroleum investments. These organisations include foreign donors, Tanzanian and foreign NGOs and research organisations. Finally, four group interviews have been conducted in villages affected by existing and upcoming gas investments in the regions of Lindi and Mtwara. The majority of the interviews were conducted by the author in English and occasionally in Swahili. Interviews in village communities and with some government officials were conducted with the help of an interpreter.
Common to all interviews was a question about how the interviewees expected the investments to generate development for Tanzania and/or their immediate surroundings. For the analysis of repertoires, interview material was used in combination with newspaper articles, legislation acts and marketing brochures. The analysis of state and corporate resources was done through coding the interview material according to Bourdieu's forms of capital as a priori codes. Finally, the interview material with corporate CSR actors, government officials, villagers and NGOs in the regions of Lindi and Mtwara were analysed to develop an understanding of the governance modes that were practiced by the state and the corporations respectively.

Actors in the negotiation arena
This section describes the actors and the 'arena' in which the development outcomes of the gas investments have been negotiated. These actors have not only included 'the state' and corporations and these two organisations have not possessed unitary agency, even though the text often refers to 'state' and 'corporation' as analytical categories. Instead, the actors in the arena include Tanzanian politicians and government officials, donor government officials, corporate representatives, people working in NGOs and think tanks as well as people living in the foreseen investments area. A central non-human actor is evidently gas, which was discovered by the BG Group and Statoil mainly between 2012 and 2015 off the Indian Ocean Coast outside the towns of Mtwara and Lindi in South-Eastern Tanzania. The discoveries spurred a project that comprises three offshore blocks, a network of offshore pipelines and an onshore processing plant for processing liquified natural gas, commonly known as the 'LNG plant'. These three offshore blocks hold the great majority of Tanzania's discovered natural gas. The gas from the blocks will be piped onshore to the LNG plant in Lindi region (Scurfield and Mihalyi, 2017). When realised, the US$ 30 billion LNG plant will be the largest foreign investment in Tanzanian history.
The gas exploration phase between 2012 and 2018 was accompanied by CSR activities in Mtwara because the town's port served the oil and gas companies during the time. After the discoveries, Shell, the owner of BG shares since 2016, Ophir Energy, Pavilion Energy, Equinor (new name of Statoil since 2018) and Exxon-Mobil together with the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) started planning the construction of the LNG plant on the coast in a rural area outside the town of Lindi. However, the negotiations about gas production and the plant have stalled for years as President Magufuli and his government were reluctant to agree on a Host Government Agreement with the corporations. Despite lengthy insecurity about the LNG plant's future, Shell and Equinor have implemented CSR activities also in the Lindi area, where the plant is planned to be built (see Table 1 for an overview).
Four of these CSR activities have been jointly funded by the corporations. Companies and the governments of Norway, Germany and the UK have also financed them while development consultancies such as the German GIZ and NGOs like the UK charity Voluntary Service Overseas have been involved in project implementation. The two main investors Shell and Equinor have hired Tanzanian staff members to administer their CSR projects. These staff members have interacted with communities in the investments area and with NGOs and other agencies that have implemented projects in Lindi and Mtwara. The public sector has been involved in implementation through vocational schools, universities and specialised agencies, and as receivers of charitable donations.
In addition to government institutions that have been implementing partners in CSR projects, ruling elites and state bureaucrats have taken part in negotiating development outcomes of the investments. On the central level, policy-making in relation to the investments has been done mostly within a small circle of people loyal to and trusted by the president. Corporate representatives (to their frustration) have been isolated from that circle. Parliamentarians have formally passed legislation and been targets of corporate lobbying but have not had much power to influence the decision-making taking place within the President's closed circle. Opposition parties Chadema and ACT Wazalendo have raised fears about whether Tanzania will truly benefit from the investments while also pushing the government to move forward with the investment negotiations so that people in Lindi and Mtwara will benefit. Ministry officials in the Ministry of Energy and Minerals and the Ministry of Justice have prepared policies and legislation and participated in the formal investment negotiations with corporations. Common to the era of president Magufuli, staff in the negotiation team, ministries and government agencies have been reshuffled several times. Some officials have also decided to leave due to frustration towards the political leadership and the lengthiness and insecurity of the process. Nonetheless, officials from the Energy and Water Utilities Regulatory Authority (EWURA) have been tasked to oversee the implementation of local content legislation and officials from the TPDC have been responsible of community relations in Lindi. TPDC officials have been 'the face' of the government when compensations and resettlements of people living in the investment area in Lindi have been handled (see also Pedersen and Kweka, 2017).
Regional authorities in Mtwara have been engaged during the exploration phase, when the port of Mtwara was used by the companies. The regional authorities of Lindi are engaged in the current and later stages, when the LNG plant will be built in Lindi. The highest-ranking local government officials have been paid courtesy visits by company representatives keen to keep up good relations. The economists and community development officers of district and municipal councils have kept records over different CSR investments made by corporations. Community development officers have also kept up relations with NGOs that have implemented corporate-funded CSR projects and initiated some projects of their own to prepare people for the investment. Village and ward officials have overseen the 'needs' of people The information has been gathered through company brochures, information requests from local government authorities and interviews and it might be incomplete. Especially the information on charitable donations might not be exhaustive.
living in different villages in the regions and acted as mediators between the communities and the corporations or higher administrative levels in government.
Beyond the government and the corporations, foreign and Tanzanian NGOs, donor governments, community-based organisations, think tanks, research institutions and academics have taken part in the negotiations through multiple trainings, workshops and publications mainly in Dar es Salaam and Dodoma, but also in Mtwara and Lindi. Tanzanian NGOs have held discussion events in Dar es Salaam and Dodoma on how Tanzania could benefit from the investments. The governmental training institute Uongozi has provided trainings for government officials on the meaning of CSR and 'local content'. Research institutes, such as Repoa and the Natural Resource Governance Institute, have published research and policy reports on how Tanzania could benefit. The presence of people and civil society organisations from Mtwara and Lindi around these formal tables has been limited and they have felt excluded from the central level discussions.
'The local people' in the regions of Lindi and Mtwara cover a population of more than two million inhabitants (United Republic of Tanzania, 2013). Agriculture is the main economic activity for about 90 per cent of the population and the main cash crop in the region is cashew nut (World Bank, 2019). Poor socio-economic development in the region has been explained by a history of political and spatial neglect during colonialism and independence. Proper roads from Dar es Salaam to the region have been built only in 2003. Previously, travelling from Dar es Salaam to Lindi and Mtwara by land could take several days amidst the height of rainy season (Wembah-Rashid, 1998).
The gas discoveries caused huge expectations in the whole country and the region of Mtwara in particular. When gas was discovered, up to four million Tanzanians expected to be employed by the gas sector and 59 per cent of the population expected that the natural gas deposits would improve their lives (Twaweza, 2015). Expectations in the Mtwara region grew huge especially when the former President Jakaya Kikwete promised potential voters that 'Mtwara will be the new Dubai' during a campaign event in 2010 (Must and Rustad, 2018). These expectations were built against a history of marginalisation of people in the south in relation to urban centres in the north. This sense of marginalisation caused violent confrontations between residents, the police and the military in Mtwara in 2012-2013 in relation to other gas investments in the region (Ahearne and Childs, 2018).
As the LNG plant will be built in Lindi instead of Mtwara, people in Mtwara are likely to be left without some of the opportunities they were promised. In Lindi, on the other hand, the investment is likely to cause significant changes in people's lives and livelihoods. The LNG plant with an adjacent business park is planned to be built on the lands of two village communities, Mto Mkavu and Likong'o. In these villages, 693 people have been compensated for the loss of livelihoods, mainly consisting of fruit and cashew trees, and a few people have been resettled between the years 2020 and 2022. Some communities in the Mbanja ward close to the local airport have been expecting relocation for many years due to a possible expansion of the airport. People interviewed in the village communities complain that they are poorly informed about the investment process, if and when it will happen and what will happen to them. They describe living in a continuously insecure situation since several years back and are still waiting to hear from government officials about what their futures will look like. Despite these frustrations about insecurity and exclusion, interviewed community members do not question the development potential of the LNG plant. Instead, they are waiting for it with very high hopes. 'For the people here, it is like Jesus is coming when the LNG plant is coming', describes an official in the Lindi municipal office.

Repertoires about corporations and poverty
While the negotiation arena has been crowded by a diversity of actors, this section looks at the oral and written discourses or 'repertoires' that 'the state' (as an analytical category) and the corporations have deployed in relation to the investments' development outcomes. Particular attention has been paid to how the state actors are doing boundary work through repertoires in relation to the corporate repertoires.
A unifying and dominant repertoire that the corporations have enacted in public can be described as 'individual capitalist empowerment'. Within this repertoire, corporations see themselves as solutions to poverty when poverty equals lack of skills, work, income and knowledge that allow for an inclusion into global capitalism. The repertoire has been visualised in the companies' CSR marketing brochures as happy, educated and successfullooking young Tanzanian men and women. Concretely, the most common aim of the CSR projects has been to promote entrepreneurship and self-employment for young Tanzanians (see Table 1). An example of such a project is the Employment and Skills for Eastern Africa Initiative that provided vocational training to improve the employability of young people in Mtwara and Lindi until the end of 2018. The aim of the project was to support education into professions such as welders and electricians that are useful for the oil and gas industry and the adjacent supply chain.
Behind the public view, considering the state as a 'problem' and themselves as victims of it has also been part of the corporate repertoire. The corporations suffer or fear of suffering from an inefficient and corrupt government administration that complicates their operations. Interviewed company representatives raise these fears especially on local government level.
Any CSR plan has to be discussed with the Local Government Authority. How can you practically operationalise that? It becomes a huge bureaucratic process. When you talk about every step with an LGA [Local Government Authority], it can become a bureaucratic nightmare, complains a company's sustainability manager.
However, even though states are considered inefficient, they are not deemed unimportant. Especially Equinor as a Norwegian state-owned company stands out on this aspect. Through its 'Oil for Development' Programme, the government of Norway has wanted to replicate its own experience in managing petroleum successfully and supported the Tanzanian government, NGOs and researchers with more than 12 million euros between 2013 and 2019. This aid has included support, among others, to the Tanzanian Revenue Authority's large taxpayers' unit and to the NGO Oxfam that has disbursed funds to small CSOs in Lindi and Mtwara for rights-enhancing trainings in the communities living close to investment sites. The company has also sponsored trips for government officials to Norway with the aim of them learning from the Norwegian experience of oil and gas extraction. These interventions have been driven by an idea to improve the Tanzanian state.
In contrast to corporate repertoires, the political repertoire centres around corporations as causes of poverty. Transnational corporations are not trusted, and their voluntary CSR contributions are dismissed as irrelevant by many interviewees. This repertoire is built on a history of mistrust and grievance that goes back to Tanzania's liberation years and to some more recent events in the country's past. In the end of the 1990s, large, foreign mining companies started operating mainly in extracting gold and gemstones. This was a time when the country was implementing structural adjustment plans and becoming increasingly dependent on development aid. At the time, transnational mining companies such as the Canadian Barrick Gold negotiated agreements that were unfavourable to Tanzanians (Lange, 2011). Subsequently this meant that Tanzania did not profit much from the investments, even though expectations towards them were high. When years went by, internationally connected Tanzanian NGOs raised awareness about human rights violations in the mining sector (Cooksey and Kelsall, 2011) and public anger towards the companies increased. In about 2010, the responsibility of these companies became a public and a political matter. A general narrative among ruling party and opposition politicians as well as Tanzanian natural resource NGOs is that the mining TNCs have ripped off Tanzania and that it is time for them to pay back what they have taken from the country. These sentiments about the mining sector echo heavily on the oil and gas sector (Lange and Kinyondo, 2016). A research institute representative explains: So you are coming from a background of a government that has been wronged before by transnationals, and coincidentally you have a president that is very sensitive and that thinks big investors are thieves. So a combination of the history that was not very good and the demeanour of this particular president made it like there's no way but to just say we don't trust anything about these people out there.
The mistrust towards transnational corporations is also part of the state's long-term vision as a liberator of Tanzanians from foreign exploitation. During the presidency of Magufuli, politics in Tanzania continued to be influenced by the thinking of the country's first president Julius Nyerere, as has been the case throughout the country's political history (Becker, 2013;Fouéré, 2014). Nyerere emphasised self-reliance and liberation from foreign dependence as important factors for the development of the country. Nyerere's national and foreign policy reflected the dichotomies between the colonisers and the colonised, the wealthy and the poor, technological advancements versus backwardness, superior versus inferior, exploiter and the exploited (Msabaha, 1995, p. 162). In his speeches, he used metaphors of exploitation when he talked about imperialists (mabeberu), capitalists (mabepari) and parasites (kupe). Through the use of language echoing Nyerere's thinking of exploiters and the exploited, the political elite, led by president Magufuli, enforced the state's boundary in relation to foreign gas investors. This repertoire during Magufuli's presidency differs from that during the former president Kikwete, where the dominant approach to corporations was a more solutionist one, described as 'gas for development' (Kamat et al, 2019). However, there has not been a uniform 'state repertoire', but at least two different repertoires, one on the political level, the other on the local administrative level. In contrast to the blame-oriented political repertoire, on local government level in Lindi and Mtwara the repertoire has been more solution-oriented. While believing that corporations can solve some local problems with poverty, regional state authorities have been worried about how to control that this actually happens. Local government officials have raised fears that companies follow their own priorities, not the state's or the communities' priorities and that they, therefore, have to be controlled.
For CSR, these gas companies decide what they do, for themselves … We ask Statoil for certain contribution to the community, but they say no, for this year for us, we only contribute in education. We are not allowed to go to other sectors … I think it would be better if they get the needs from the community through the municipal director, explains a government official in Mtwara.
The analysis of repertoires shows how the state has engaged in boundary work between the global and the local and the public and the private through a discourse of blame and control in relation to a corporate repertoire that has been built around solution and victimhood, meaning that corporations believe that they can solve problems related to poverty through development interventions, but preferably without heavy intrusion from the state bureaucracy. The state repertoire also moves between blame and solution, building an image of the state as a fighter of foreign exploitation while at the same time expecting corporations to generate socio-economic development.

Marking boundaries with resources
In addition to repertoires, the making of statehood and corporate development agency has involved the mobilisation of resources. These resources have been mobilised to both mark and blur boundaries. In this section, these resources are analysed based on Bourdieu's 'forms of capital ', meaning economic, social, cultural and symbolic meta-capital (1986; 1994).
From a conventional viewpoint of economic capital, the setting between some of the world's largest petroleum corporations and the Tanzanian state is evidently very asymmetric. Measured against revenue income (2019, US dollars), the largest investors Shell, Equinor and ExxonMobil have annual revenues that are seven to 40 times higher than Tanzania's revenue income and up to five times higher than the country's annual GDP.
However, during the research period, the corporations were not making any profit in Tanzania because gas production had not started, and the state was yet to gain revenue income. Would the LNG project go ahead, revenue from it could average approximately US$ 2.3 billion a year over the period of gas production (Scurfield and Mihalyi, 2017) and the country could be compensated quite well relative to other similar countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Mmari et al, 2019). Even though revenue income from the investments has been considered vital and the amounts Tanzania could gain have been debated heavily among politicians, all Tanzanian actors in the 'negotiation arena' have seen the TNCs' immense economic capital as a prerequisite for them to invest in the development of Tanzania beyond the generation of revenues.
Despite the relative lack of economic capital in the form of finances, the government has mobilised its economic capital to mark the public-private boundary through the ownership of land and gas. It has announced a renegotiation of all Profit Sharing Agreements (PSAs) with the corporations and dragged its feet on concluding a Host Government Agreement on the LNG plant. As was mentioned above, as the landowner, the government, through TPDC, has taken care of the compensations of people in the LNG project site. Both sides have also mobilised cultural capital. Within the sector of oil and gas extraction, the corporations possess incomparable cultural capital in terms of information and skills to manoeuvre financial, technological and labour-related aspects of the investments. Symbolic capital attached to their economic and sector-specific cultural capital has boosted the corporations with social capital within the sector of development cooperation, and they have become part of development cooperation networks with donor governments such as Norway and the UK, who have wanted to pool funding into joint development projects with them (see Table 1). The corporations have used an undisclosed amount of financial capital to fund projects and give charitable donations.
On both central and local levels, government officials express a lack of cultural capital in the form of skills, information and knowledge about the sector and the investment. However, especially on the local level, government officials have mobilised cultural and social capital in claiming that they have the best information about the people and communities living in the investment areas. The corporations have not given this claim much symbolic value and instead, hired independent consultants to do environmental and social assessments in parallel to the state's assessments. The corporations have for example been worried that the compensation process will not be handled according to international standards, namely the World Bank's Equator Principles that are a financial industry standard for environmental and social risk management in large projects. This has led to lengthy negotiations between the state and the oil and gas corporations on whether the process should be handled either based on national and international standards, with a subsequent compromise that some parts of the acquired land are compensated based on international standards and some according to Tanzanian standards (Pedersen and Jacob, 2017).
The government's lack of economic and cultural capital has affected the negotiations and policy-making related to the investment and boosted fear and mistrust (cf. Abel and Villanger, 2019). In addition, the president has feared his weak base within the ruling party and his power over future rents from the investments (Jacob and Pedersen, 2018). As described above, this has led to the centralisation of decision-making power to a small group of people loyal to the president and the subsequent exclusion of parliamentarians, corporations and other actors from the negotiation process. To counter internal fears and to address public mistrust towards the investors, the government has mobilised its juridicial 'meta-capital', through the passing of legislation that aims to increase the power of Tanzanian government agencies, businesses and citizens to benefit from the investments. This legislation has been a process to mark the formal boundary between the public and the private spheres.
Juridical capital for socio-economic development has been mobilised concretely through the passing of so-called local content regulations in 2017. The regulations aim at maximising Tanzanian gains from the global oil and gas economy. According to the act, a qualified Tanzanian citizen is given priority in employment and training in any matter relating to petroleum activity; preference is given to goods and services provided, manufactured or locally available in Tanzania; and Tanzanian citizens are given priority in any matter relating to technology transfer, research, development and innovation in any petroleum-related activities. The government has provided investors with detailed schedules and percentages according to which this 'indigenisation process' is expected to take place (United Republic of Tanzania, 2017a).
Using local content policy to impose national benefit as a mandatory requirement for corporations resonates with a need to distribute rents to ensure a political settlement and an aim to enlarge the black capitalist class that has remained small since independence and mainly able to engage in easy-entry and low-risk economic activities (Hansen et al., 2016;Whitfield et al., 2015). It also resonates with a continental trend to impose indigenisation policies that aim to economically empower local populations (Andrews and Nwapi, 2018;Ovadia, 2016). A high-ranking government official in Dar es Salaam describes the local content regulation as a tool to change the mindsets of corporations so that they understand that local people can be employed instead of corporations' 'fellow countrymen'.
The local content regulations were passed hastily in 2017 after a government-maneuvered scandal about the Canadian mining company Barrick Gold's subsidiary Acacia's tax evasion broke out and caused widespread public outcry. This event was also central to the political repertoire against transnational corporations. The government claimed that Acacia had evaded taxes worth 190 billion US dollars when exporting gold. A ruling party MP explained how the government felt powerless in trying to avoid capital flight from the country and looked for other ways to gain from natural resource investments: To be honest, if you look at the tax administration, there are a lot of challenges. We don't have the competence to audit timely, to be on the top of things in real time, so that we would maximise only through revenue. We might be disappointed in the end if we only rely on revenue. That's why I see a lot of value in local content but little potential in tax income.
Two months after the local content regulations, the government also hastily introduced three other legislative acts 3 to regulate the natural resource sector in a very explicit anti-colonial tone that highlights sovereignty and the importance to seize control of the country's natural resources. This was another mobilisation of juridical capital, this time to formally mark the local-global boundary. Two of these acts cite United Nation's General Assembly's Resolution 1803 (XVIII) of 1962, at the break of colonialism, which declared that all nations have a right to 'permanent sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources', which 'must be exercised in the interest of their national development and of the well-being of the people' (United Republic of Tanzania, 2017b, p.10). The Permanent Sovereignty Act prohibited any proceedings related to Tanzania's natural resources in foreign courts or tribunals.
The oil and gas companies have dismissed the local content regulation as unrealistic, too ambitious and too risky. Again, they have hired consultants to do a parallel assessment on the Tanzanian local content base and concluded that Tanzania lacks enough skilled labour and suitable businesses to fulfil the requirements of the legislation. According to company interviewees, this parallel assessment has not been seriously considered by the government, which has raised a lot of worries among private sector actors.
The local content policy has also enforced the state's symbolic capital in Mtwara and Lindi. In the legislation, local government authorities have been granted powers to approve the companies' annual CSR plans (United Republic of Tanzania, 2017a). The law responds to the control-related local government repertoire according to which corporations do what they want and are not aligned with local demands and local development plans.
The granting of powers to local government authorities to control corporations' CSR activities is not only a formal enforcement of the public-private boundary, but also reflects ongoing negotiations within the state and the ruling party. On the local government level, a lack of economic capital in relation to the central government has shaped attitudes towards corporate CSR projects, as local level officials have tended to be more positive than ruling elites towards CSR interventions made by corporations. Even though the state has imposed its boundaries in relation to foreign investors through the mobilisation of economic, cultural and juridical capital, the next section shows that a lack of resources on local government level leads to a blurring of these boundaries.

Blurred governance
This section focuses on the modes of governance that the state and corporations respectively enact when generating socio-economic development in Lindi and Mtwara. Inspired by Foucault's (1991) concept 'governmentality', the analysis focuses on what the actors aim to change or conserve and what techniques they apply for doing it.
For corporations and their project partners, changing mindsets from dependants to responsible, self-governed individuals has been a central aim. This aim comes across in company interviews and in interviews with the NGOs that implement projects the companies fund. An NGO representative that implements a Shell-funded project describes this objective well: We prepare them [beneficiaries] to become businessmen. We help them have good business ideas, to realise the business and to formalise their business so that they can sell their products for different companies. We train them, also to change their mindsets from dependent to independent. To become an entrepreneur! From just waiting for aid from the government and other institutions, to have their own accumulations. To change their mindsets to see these investments as an opportunity for them.
The governance rationality of these CSR interventions can be described as neoliberal in that it aims to transform beneficiaries into skilful, self-governed entrepreneurs, integrated into the global (gas) value chain. This is nothing new, as previous research on corporate development interventions has shown that their rationale tends to be neoliberal (Blowfield and Dolan, 2014).
In contrast, interviews with community development officers point to the government not being so interested in changing mindsets but in increasing people's material wellbeing and having control over corporate-funded development interventions. This contrasts with earlier findings on government-led community development in Tanzania, that has found officials being very concerned about changing mindsets (Green, 2021, p. 279). In this case, the community development officers Mtwara and Lindi highlight the collecting and listing of 'needs' and making regional development plans that aim to fulfil them as the main governance technique in communities living in the vicinity of investment sites. Through the collection of needs, villagelevel officials act as brokers between higher levels of the state administration and corporations on one hand and ordinary villagers on the other hand. Subsequently, the state's aim is to see corporations fulfil at least some of the needs recognised in the regional development plans.
The need for providing social services and material donations comes up frequently in interviews with village and ward level government representatives. These include health services, water, electricity, construction of classrooms and donations of desks. A local government official comments that corporations' entrepreneurship projects are useless if the beneficiaries are not supported with material and financial donations to start their businesses with. Some officers also express that they expect the companies to support the provision or construction of services that the government is unable to provide. 'If there is a need for 15 classrooms and the government has supported the construction of eight, we expect the companies to build the rest', explains a ward official in Lindi. Donating social services is also considered a conditionality for the establishment of good relations between the companies and the communities and the local government respectively. Government and NGO representatives express social norms such as 'if you are human, you do it', 'companies should contribute as anyone can contribute as a citizen', when asked about CSR or donations to communities.
In response to these demands, corporations give direct material donations to communities and the government, but with some reluctance. They have built classrooms, purchased desks, refurbished a public library, covered health care costs and sponsored events (see Table 1). These are, as one company interviewee puts it, 'direct demands from the communities that enable the companies to have licenses to operate'. However, corporate representatives do not consider corporate philanthropy to be sustainable in the long term because it creates relations of dependence and does not support the companies' 'business case' in a similar manner that projects in entrepreneurial or professional skills do.
The public-private provision of services and material wellbeing shows how the governance rationalities of the state and corporations become intertwined in a logic of clientelism and the boundaries between them become blurred. Also, the corporate-funded interventions combine neoliberal and clientelistic, dependency-creating techniques of governing when donating 'changed mindsets' through projects, as has been noted by previous research (Rajak, 2011, Welker, 2014. Moreover, the state is present in these projects as implementing partners. In other words, despite the boundary work that mainly the central government does through repertoires and the mobilisation of different forms of capital, the boundaries between public-private and local-global become blurred in the provision of 'development' to the people living in the vicinity of the investment in Mtwara and Lindi.

Concluding discussion
In this article I have asked in which ways the boundaries between the state and petroleum corporations are made and become blurred in negotiations over the aims and practices of socio-economic development. I have analysed this question through a focus on actors, repertoires, resources and governance modes. The analysis has shown how state actors engage in boundary work (Mitchell, 1991;1999) through repertoires and the mobilisation of different forms of capital, but that public-private and global-local boundaries become blurred in governing the development of people living in the investment area. The reasons for blurred boundaries are that local government authorities seek to gain financial and material donations from corporations due to their lack of resources, andthat state actors are implementing partners in some of the CSR projects that corporations sponsor. Unravelling the diversity of actors involved in negotiating over the development outcomes of the foreign investment, state and corporate repertoires, their respective negotiation resources and their differing and complementary practices to govern over people in the investment area has shown how corporate-driven development becomes deeply entangled into the making of statehood. From this angle, concepts such as 'institutional void' or 'limited statehood' often used in CSR research to describe states (e.g. Adeleye et al., 2020;Amaeshi et al., 2016;Börzel et al., 2012;Nwoke, 2021), prevent researchers from grasping the complex roles, agency and power of states in relation to CSR.
The analysis of respective corporate and state repertoires shows that they clash on central, political level, wherethe state engages in boundary making towards the corporations that are considered foreign 'imperialist' forces On the local level, however, state and corporate repertoires are united around the idea of corporations providing solutions to poverty but differ on the role states should have in that process. The corporate repertoire considers the local government as inefficient and possibly corrupt, which reflects both unmaking and making of statehood with the aim to improve the state. In contrast, local government officials consider the corporations to be driving their own agendas without respect for locally defined development needs and priorities and, therefore, officials seek to increase control over CSR interventions.
The analysis of different forms of capital that the state and the corporations mobilise in the negotiations allows a look beyond financial figures that usually reflect a heavy asymmetry of resources between corporations and states in the global South. Considering economic capital from a broader perspective than just financial resources, and including symbolic, social and cultural capital provides a broader understanding of how power is mobilised between states and corporations in a process of marking boundaries. The government has used its economic capital, namely theownership of gas and land, and mobilised its symbolic 'meta-capital' particularly in the form of juridical capital to exercise formal power over the development outcomes of the investments.
Finally, applying a governance mode approach makes it possible to analyse the making (and unmaking) of statehood in relation to the people living in the investment area. This analysis shows that boundaries between the state and the corporations become blurry through clientelist practices on the community level. Even though the corporate, neoliberal mode seems to be at odds with the state's clientelist governance mode, it shares similar characteristics with it because the entrepreneurial CSR projects as well as the different material donations have a clientelistic, dependencygenerating character, as has been noted in previous research on CSR (Hönke, 2018;Rajak, 2011). The state, while building an image of a sovereign power fighting foreign exploitation, wants to reap the benefits from foreign investment, as long as it gets to control how development is defined and practiced (cf. Nilsson, 2022). Even though state actors have mobilised different forms of capital to mark boundaries, it is the lack of economic capital that is a cause for blurred boundaries on the local level in the investment region. This finding supports previous research about Global South states and foreign investors negotiating over the responsibility to provide services in investment areas (Appel, 2012;Welker, 2014).
In this article I make two contributions to literature on CSR, governments and development. First, I introduce a relational and processual approach to studying state-corporate relations in light of CSR. The analytical section of this article does not cover the large variety of different angles that could be analysed in more depth through a relational approach, but it nevertheless aims to encourage future research on states and corporations to engage with literature that has investigated statesociety relations from processual and open-ended angles (e.g. Migdal and Schlichte, 2005;Mitchell, 1991Mitchell, , 1999Thelen et al., 2014). Second, I show that in addition to allied interests between states and foreign investors, relations between the actors involve constant work to produce a separation between the public and private and global and local. The identification of boundary work as well as blurred boundaries also means that instead of corporate CSR being seen as a means to 'fill in' for absent or weak states, corporate-driven development interventions should be understood to be deeply entangled in the process of making and unmaking statehood.

Notes on contributor
Eva Nilsson is a PhD candidate at Hanken School of Economics. Her PhD focuses on the positioning and power of states in the Global South toward corporate social responsibility. Previously Nilsson has worked in advisory roles in NGOs on issues related to the private sector and development.