Nigerian oil and gas industry local content development: A stakeholder analysis

This paper undertakes the first stakeholder analysis of the Nigerian oil and gas industry local content development (LCD) policy to gain a better understanding of the extent of stakeholders’ interactions and how such interactions align to conditions conducive to local content development. Drawing from policy documents and semi-structured interviews, 15 stakeholder groups are identified, and seven of them categorized as key “players.” A social network analysis then reveals that (i) a significant proportion of relationships between key players are unidirectional; (ii) a marginal role is played by higher education institutions within the network; (iii) it is international oil companies rather than indigenous operators that exhibit “global centrality” within the industry network, with the former stakeholder group pivotally determining industry activities. Our findings provide a valuable first step toward the development of a polycentric framework for the appraisal of the Nigerian local content development policy.