Green Futures for Environmental Peacebuilding in Nigeria: Challenges and opportunities for oil producing communities in the Niger delta

art by Sonya Montenegro (USA) of The Far Woods

Dr. Zainab Mai-Bornu (University of Leicester); Professor Fidelis Allen (University of Port Harcourt); Professor Roy Maconachie (University of Bath); Dr. Miho Taka (Coventry University)

Environmental challenges offer local actors opportunities for cooperative behaviour that transcend political and ethnic boundaries, giving women and youth a stake in environmental peacebuilding. They may be less politically sensitive than other issues, such as resource control, and could motivate various local actors to contemplate longer-term solutions to peacebuilding in the Niger Delta.

Context

Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer and holds the second largest oil reserve on the continent, after Libya.[i] Yet, it is a country where grievances about the uneven distribution of the benefits and harms from oil and gas projects have long been a catalyst for violent conflict. The Niger Delta, the country’s oil producing region in the south along the Gulf of Guinea, faces many environmental, economic, and political challenges. Farmlands and rivers have been severely polluted through oil spillages, destroying the livelihoods of the communities that traditionally depend upon farming and fishing. Despite the oil revenues produced from the region, these communities are deprived of adequate infrastructure and basic services including clean water, roads, schools, and health facilities. As such deprivation has endured, non-violent resistance by these communities has turned into violent conflict. Despite the continuing devastation in the Niger Delta and the global shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the Nigerian government seeks to finance oil exploration in the Lake Chad Basin in the north by allocating 30 per cent of the revenue from the state oil company through the recently passed Petroleum Industry Bill. In this context, we ask a key question: what can we learn from the experiences of the affected communities in the Niger Delta who have been involved in environmental peacebuilding, in one form or another, for decades?

What’s been done

The development of environmental peacebuilding as a research and policy area[ii] will require further attention to the role of environmental social movements at the community level in the Niger Delta.  Some groups that fall into this category include local community women and youth groups such as Ijaw Women Connect, Ogbia Women, Federation of Ogoni Women’s Association (FOWA), Ijaw Youth Council, and the National Youth Council of Ogoni People. These groups have a major role to play in the management of natural resources in the Niger Delta. They are active in the processes of conflict and peacebuilding in natural resource management and the distribution of bottom-up benefits in Nigeria. The women’s groups are always at the forefront of peaceful demonstrations. Being mothers, wives, and sisters, they exert their influence through peaceful dialogue between aggrieved youth groups within and between local communities. For instance, FOWA’s actions go beyond protests; they engage in nonviolent advocacy, which recognizes the importance of the land to the Ogoni people.  Women in the movement's organizations, however, are equally concerned about entrenched patriarchal attitudes.  Some of them raise issues of patriarchy, marginalization, and lack of support at the local, state, and national levels.

Looking ahead

Focusing on the role that gender and youth play in environmental peacebuilding processes, our multi-disciplinary research has demonstrated how a more nuanced, bottom-up understanding of environmental peacebuilding efforts at the grassroots level can help to inform the development and implementation of locally grounded policy initiatives that have more resonance with local communities. Local communities are often successful in the management of natural resources[iii] and environmental conflicts.[iv] In the process, these bottom-up approaches serve as an empowerment tool for marginalized and vulnerable communities,[v] whose voices often take a ‘back seat’ during peace and conflict negotiations.

We argue here that although environmental challenges offer opportunities for cooperation between local actors as they exceed political and ethnic boundaries—giving women and youth a stake in environmental peacebuilding—they may be less sensitive politically than other issues such as resource control and could motivate various local actors to contemplate longer term solutions to peacebuilding in the Delta.[vi]  Shared environmental issues may also open entry points for cooperation and peace-making[vii] as well as the potential for a unified approach to grievances rather than context-specific battles.

As Nigeria's green energy transition evolves, stakeholders in oil-dependent communities face common challenges and opportunities for cooperative behaviour. Moving away from top-down solutions to environmental problems to bottom-up strategies designed in a conflict-sensitive way, alongside the inclusion of active women and youth groups to achieve the desired impact for post-conflict oil-producing communities, is important. The practical reconciliation of the federal government’s interest in oil and gas and investments in a green future in the Niger Delta may be difficult to conceptualize. The green future for environmental peacebuilding opportunities in Nigeria remains high. In other words, despite the challenges, a green future based on active environmental peacebuilding analysis is possible. This in part is due to the growing possibility of a green world in which fossil fuels would have lost their hold on many countries’ energy systems.

Footnotes

[i] See EIA Report on Nigeria (https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/NGA)

[ii] Ide, T., Bruch, C., Carius, A., Conca, K., Dabelko, G.D., Matthew, R. and Weinthal, E. (2021) ‘The past and future (s) of environmental peacebuilding’, International Affairs, 97(1): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiaa177

[iii] Ostrom, E. (1990) Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge

[iv] Taher, T., Bruns, B., Bamaga, O., Al-Weshali, A. and Van Steenbergen, F. (2012) ‘Local groundwater governance in Yemen: building on traditions and enabling communities to craft new rules’, Hydrogeology Journal 20(6): 1177–88. https://doi.org/:10.1007/s10040-012-0863-1

[v] Nixon, R. (2011) Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[vi] Barnett, J., and Adger, W.N. (2007) ‘Climate change, human security and violent conflict’, Political Geography 26(6): 639-55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.03.003

[vii] Conca, K., and Dabelko, G.D. eds, (2002). Environmental peacemaking. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.