Suchergebnisse

In the heyday of insurgency in Nigeria's oil-rich but poor Niger Delta region, much scholarly effort was made to explain this conflict as being borne out of relative deprivation. This paper contests the logic of using relative deprivation as the cause, as opposed to the reconfiguration of power in Nigeria's national politics. This has seen the emergence of a president from the once marginalized Niger Delta region and the resultant dynamics of post-conflict peace-building. We also examine the consequences of a return to peace in the Niger Delta, in spite of the failure of the Nigerian state and oil transnational corporations to address the grievances that were widely canvassed as the reasons for rebellion. I conclude that insurgency in Nigeria is spawned not so much by conditions of relative deprivation, as by the nature of Nigeria's fundamentally flawed federalism.

Against the background of new models of corporate-community engagements in response to the failings of old models by oil transnationals, this article attempts an assessment of the implementation of the Global Memorandum of Understanding (GMoU) by Chevron and Shell on sustainable community development in host communities in Nigeria's oil belt. It argues that though the GMoU represents a radical departure from the past in terms of participation and ownership of development projects with the benefits these entail, its potency for sustainable development is hampered by a number of old challenges, namely, the enormity of the development challenge in the Delta thrown up by the failings of an absentee state, the structural constraints imposed on corporations by the profit-maximizing motive and cultural factors that not only prevent effective participation but also promote voicelessness of marginalized groups such as women. The implications of these to sustainable development are explored.

Corporate–community relations in the Niger Delta region are, almost without exception, framed in the context of conflict, borne out of dysfunctional or misguided corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and practices by oil transnationals. Based on a comparative study of the CSR policies and practices of Shell, Total and Agip in six oil-bearing communities in Rivers State, a core oil-bearing state in the Niger Delta, this paper contests this orthodoxy, pointing out significant variations in the intensity and scale of conflicts between host communities and different oil transnational corportions (TNCs) in the region. The key question explored in the study is: to what extent is the variation in CSR policy and practices implicated in variation in the intensity and scale of conflicts between host communities and oil TNCs in the Niger Delta? We conclude that the intensity and scale of conflict in corporate–community relations in the Niger Delta region are a function of the CSR pattern of the operating oil TNC. The implications of this for CSR policy and practice are explored.