Causal Effects of Extractives Industry Interdisciplinary Reform on Institutional Accountability in Uganda: A Difference-in-Differences Design

While the extractives sector has attracted considerable governance scholarship, existing work predominantly relies on cross-sectional correlations or descriptive case studies that cannot disentangle the effects of institutional reform from concurrent political and economic shocks. The article argues that the introduction of interdisciplinary oversight mechanisms, which integrate geological, environmental, social and fiscal expertise into a single regulatory framework, creates a plausibly exogenous source of variation across licensing districts and over time. We formalise a staggered adoption design, specify the identifying assumptions of parallel trends and no interference, and propose a suite of robustness checks including synthetic control methods and placebo tests. The analysis is designed to estimate the effect of reform on measurable dimensions of accountability, including audit frequency, public disclosure timeliness and the responsiveness of regulatory agencies to community grievances. The principal contribution is a transparent, replicable identification strategy that can be implemented with administrative data routinely collected by the Directorate of Petroleum and the National Environment Management Authority. The article concludes by specifying the data requirements and estimation procedures necessary for future empirical implementation, thereby providing a template for credible causal inference in African extractives governance research.