Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the multinationals, they also called on international organizations and
especially leading Western states, such as the United States and Great
Britain, home to many of the primary multinationals operating in the
Delta, to infl uence these entities to change their behavior. These govern-
ments proved reluctant allies until the local protest movement, begun in
Ogoniland in the early 1990s, gained salience (Ikelegbe 2001).
The combination of international media attention generated by local
and INGO-generated efforts as well as continuing violence have prompted
changes in petroleum-company attitudes and operations. And the years
of community protest, ongoing NGO and INGO advocacy efforts, and
fi nally, new behavior within the national Nigerian government with the
advent of civilian rule, have brought changes to the Delta region. These
changes, however, have not yet overcome the inertia represented by
entrenched corruption in state and local governments in the Delta region.
Accordingly, the area's citizens remain poor and continue to live in
ecologically bereft conditions.
This situation highlights the fragility of the nation-state as actor in
globalized scenarios and paradoxically, its continuing signifi cance. Given
Nigeria's relative dependence on oil revenues, it perhaps should have
been expected that the national government would not advocate control-
ling the behavior of the international oil companies—“the geese laying
their golden eggs.” Nonetheless, there is little evidence that the compa-
nies would have shut down operations with the imposition of more
vigorous federal government regulation to prevent pollution, given the
quality of Nigerian crude, the profi tability of Delta operations, and
the relative reliance of the company's home governments on the region's
oil and the political pressures implicit in that reality. Contrary to many
types of confl icts between communities and corporations, multinationals
engaged in resource-extraction industries cannot simply move their
capital to wherever labor is most desperate and accommodating. The oil
is where it is and as such it provides owner states like Nigeria with the
power to negotiate.
What is clearer is that vigorous regulation did not occur, whether the
product of powerful state disinterest, Nigerian governmental fear, federal
offi cials' willingness to discriminate against the minorities in the region,
or corruption. Despite sustained efforts by local and transnational civil
society organizations, changes in national government policy, and dispo-
sition and shifts in petroleum-company behavior, the overall political and
economic situation in the Delta has changed only slowly. As Beck might
contend, the rules that would create new opportunities and improved
