Managing wickedness in the Niger Delta: Can a new approach to multi-stakeholder governance increase voice and sustainability?

Recent efforts by the largest oil companies in Nigeria have shifted their corporate social responsibility to reflect more bottom-up participatory approaches to development and environmental conflict management in the Niger Delta. The newest approach, the Global Memorandum of Understanding, is a model of network governance, clustering groups of communities together into representative boards that make decisions on local development projects. This model could prove to be an important tool for managing conflicts over resources and revenues in Nigeria's main oil producing region. However, the legacy of violent conflicts within and between indigenous groups, militias and the military, government and oil companies amid ongoing environmental devastation from destructive oil extraction practices, makes trust and cooperation difficult, at best. In this context, where conflict runs deep and power is asymmetrical, developing an effective model of local governance for sustainable development is a wicked planning problem. This paper traces the gradual shift from competition to collaboration among stakeholders through the Pan Delta movement for social and environmental justice, which has introduced new voices and values to the debate over the region's future. Qualitative content analysis of secondary data is used to apply the wicked problems framework to the problem of local governance amid the political ecology of social and natural resource conflicts and increasing expectations for public involvement in resource allocation decisions. Similar fundamental political transitions are happening in other African countries. The Niger Delta presents a model case from a region that has been under-studied in the wicked problems literature and discourse.