Ghana’s status as a new oil producer raises questions about the developmental effects of resources, and the role of political institutions in these processes. Ghana’s oil economy is dominated by foreign investors and despite the country’s strong democratic record and internationally acclaimed oil governance legislation the impacts of oil exploitation have been limited. The paper argues that the reasons for this lie in the nature of elite-based political coalitions and we root our analysis of Ghana’s hydrocarbons in the political settlements literature, which moves us beyond the ‘good governance’ approaches so often linked to ‘resource curse’ thinking. We also move beyond the instrumentalism of political settlements theory to examine the role political ideas play in attracting inward investment and in shaping resource governance. We argue that inter-coalitional rivalry has generally undermined the benefits of Ghana’s oil but that a crude interests-based interpretation is insufficient to explain differences between these coalitions.