Case Study: Shell and the Niger Delta

Question of the Case Study

To what extent does the operation of Shell in the Niger Delta illustrate how corporate power drives environmental poverty and hinders human development?

Why this case matters?

• Shell extracts oil from Niger Delta since 1958

• The region now supplies 90% of Nigeria’s export earnings and 2/3 of gov revenue

• But Niger Delta remains one of the poorest and most polluted regions

What is this case example of?

Resource curce

What is resource curse?

A state with abundant natural wealth but weak regulatory capacity, in which a powerful MNC operates with more effective control over environmental outcomes than the government meant to regulate it

Core dilemma

• Oil revenue is main financial driver in Nigeria

• Federal government has an incentive not to enforce environmental law too strictly against Shell and IOCs

• But decades of spills and gas flaring degrade fishing and farming based livelihoods of Delta communities

• So the poverty the oil economy was supposed to relieve is exacerbated

Key Facts

• Shell in Nigeria since 1958

• 90% of export earnings

• 10 000 spills in Delta over past decade, several million barrels cumulative since 1958

• Bayelsa state poverty rate 89% (national av 63%) 2022 NBS) - despite being where oil was first struck

UNEP investigation

• 14 month (2011)

• sampled 4000 sites

• In Ogoniland groundwater contaminated with benzene up to 1800 times the WHO drinking-water guideline

What is the core of the issue?

Weather MNCs operating in a state with weak regulatory enforcement, can be held to the same environmental and human-rights standards it would face in its home jurisdiction

Background to the Issue

• first began in Niger Delta at Oloibiri in 1956

• 
  

Key scale of the issue:

•