Mainstreaming strategic thinking in policy making for new oil and gas frontiers in Nigeria through a transition to strategic environmental assessment

Abstract

Despite more than six decades of oil and gas exploration and production in Nigeria's old frontier basin areas in the Niger Delta region, the Nigerian government enacted the 2021 Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), which outlines an ambitious plan to expand oil and gas development into new frontier basin fields that possess significant hydrocarbon resource potential. To date, decisions about energy development are predominantly made based on a project-by-project basis through Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), and often not within a longer-term policy-planning and strategic context that could help design and guide policy and decision-making for sustainable oil and gas development transition. This study explores the potential for mainstreaming a strategic thinking approach to planning and impact assessment in Nigeria's oil and gas policy sector through a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) to help drive the decision process toward more sustainable outcomes. Informed by ideas from transition management theory, the study applied a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative approaches that included the administration of two survey questionnaires: one with communities who live in the oil and gas old frontier basin areas and one with EIA practitioners. In-depth semi-structured interviews were also conducted with policymakers, regulators, industry, environmental non-governmental organisations, academics, local community leaders in the old and new frontier basin regions and representatives from the multilateral development organisations. The research findings reveal transition pathways in which a strategic thinking approach to Nigeria's oil and gas policy and plan-making can be mainstreamed through environmental assessment. It unearths well-founded rationales and potential critical decision factors that could enable a transition toward a more strategic approach to planning and environmental assessment. These include slow-changing landscape trends related to learning potential from the prevailing EIA practice in the old frontier of hydrocarbon exploration and development, the influence of the broader exogenous landscape factors such as sustainability consideration and climate change issues, coupled with the increasing demands for SEA implementation as a pre-condition for funding oil and gas development by the international multilateral and bilateral development agencies and the opportunity of a decision window provided by the PIA. The findings also identify potential barriers to the prospects of a transition toward a strategic approach in Nigeria's oil and gas industry, which include key features of the incumbent EIA regime that are characterised by unclear and rigid institutional and regulatory arrangements, value conflicts, disparate objectives, politics and power constellation, path-dependencies and lock-ins. The research concludes by proposing a transition-based EIA framework for Nigeria's oil and gas policy sector, which identifies pathways in which mainstreaming a strategic approach to planning and impact assessment can complement and enhance the efficacy of the existing project-level EIA and support the hydrocarbon development transitions in Nigeria's new frontier basin regions toward a sustainable outcome.