The Bodo community versus Shell: the shifting politics of oil and the social contract in the Niger Delta

In 2008, an oil pipeline belonging to the Shell Petroleum Development Company, burst in Bodo community. Bodo community is a settlement of thirty-five villages in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region and home to about 45,000 people. In 2015, seven years and an estimated 600,000 barrels of oil spills later, this group of villages accomplished something unprecedented. They got a powerful international extractive company to accept liability for an oil spill, agree to clean it up and pay individual compensation to each family in the respective villages. They did this without the support of the Nigerian state, which is typically responsible for regulatory enforcement in the extractive industry space. This protagonist/enforcer role of the state emerges from a collective understanding or a hypothetical contract, which has citizens accepting state authority if the state delivers certain economic and social benefits. This hypothetical contract is referred to as a social contract.

This thesis is about the relationship between social contracts and globalization, particularly in resource rich countries where the nature of the global exchange around resources extraction influences state-society relations. It identifies and addresses the gap in contemporary social contractual discourse around the increasingly visible role of transnational actors when it comes to the enforcement of agreed standards and norms at the national level and what this means for the role of the state within a social contract.

This thesis is also about the people who live in places where natural resources are extracted, the sociopolitical aspirations which shape their perceptions of justice and how the delineation of roles between the nation state and federating units (or States) affects the response to these perceptions. Finally, this research is about the use of legal action to achieve sociopolitical objectives and why this approach is becoming more relevant to contemporary development praxis.

From examining various perspectives, this thesis suggests that a social contractual frame is not limited to the relationship between the nation-state and citizens as originally envisaged by originators of the social contract theory. Instead, it should also cover the accountability that powerful actors or entities owe to those who have less power in exchange for the right to have power. While acknowledging some of the modern-day scepticism around the social contract, it is proposed that with an approach that is both innovative and inclusive, the social contract could effectively mitigate some of the recurring tensions in places like the Niger Deta region.