Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Under the same rationale, Nigerian state and local governments owe
their citizens effective services in the health and education domains—
over which they exercise primary responsibility under the Nigerian con-
stitution. Like the national government, these entities should devise and
offer open budgetary, accounting, and administrative systems by which
their use of federally allocated resources may be judged. State offi cials
should work to provide educational opportunities for citizens and for
development in each of the state's communities. State actors should
coordinate with national offi cials to secure the nation's environmental
protection, regulation, and remediation. Localities owe their citizens the
same transparency and determined efforts to secure program and project
effectiveness for which the nation and states are responsible, including
wise use and protection of natural resources. Like their state and national
counterparts, they owe their citizens open choice-making processes and
clear reporting concerning how public resources have been employed and
why.
In the same vein, based on the normative ideal outlined above, the
multinational oil corporations owe their host nation and its government(s)
their best efforts to assist them in securing their people against unwanted
or obnoxious external costs resulting from their operations, active com-
pliance with relevant host-country and international law and norms, and
fair dealing in contract development and business operations. Ethically,
they owe their hosts due regard for the privilege of working in their
territory and good-faith efforts to conduct their operations with appro-
priate accountability standards and in accord with relevant governmental
and international requirements. To the extent that coexploitation of
national resources may be considered a legitimate activity for both guests
(such as multinationals) and hosts (Nigerians), multinational corpora-
tions have the ethical responsibility to be accountable to the mores and
controls of the hosts in the sense of Derrida's ethics of hospitality (Derrida
2000).
This idealized model suggests the multiple and interrelated account-
abilities governments face as custodians of the public interest both in
terms of democratic processes and outcomes. There are obligations to
deliver services—schools, medical care, environmental protection—that
in fact rely on the governments' capacities to develop economically. In
the case that follows, Beck's double contingencies help us understand
how inequality lingers even as global and national actors begin to mature
out of confl ict into progressively more transparent and accountable
actors.
