This PhD dissertation deals with the evolution of the institutional and organizational framework of the Russian oil indThis PhD dissertation deals with the evolution of the institutional and organizational framework of the Russian oil industry during the period 1992-2012. Its main objective is to characterize and reinterpret the increasing involvement of the national oil companies (NOCs), Rosneft and Gazpromneft, in the upstream activities observed since the middle of the 2000's. Relying on the New Institutional Economics framewrokd, we argue that the increasing involvement of the Russian NOCs can be characterized as a change from a liberal oil governance structure to a hybrid oil governance structure. We show that this organizational evolution must be interpreted as the feasible reform that can be implemented by the federal authorities for dealing with the incoherence between the liberal governance structure defined at the beginning of the transition process and the Russian institutional environment.
