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Oka, Nosayaba Odemwingie (2024) Exploring the Influence of the Social-Ecological System Condition Around Oilfields on the Economic Outcome of Nigeria’s Natural Resource-Dependent Economy. PhD thesis, University of Gloucestershire.
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Abstract
Exploring natural resource-dependent contexts’ social-economic problems through the social-ecological systems framework provides valuable sets of variables for understanding the outcome of the social interaction during resource extraction. In the Nigerian context, three property rights regulate the common-pool resources system around its oilfields. However, once oil resource is discovered in any community, natural resource management centralises the interactions within the social-ecological system. Previous studies applying GDP datasets to interpret the Nigerian social-economic problems may have overlooked the natural resource management challenges in the oil resource mining contexts. This thesis traces the history of natural resource management evolution and structuring to understand governance system design, capability, and enforcement impact on social-economic systems in Nigeria, starting from the oil mining contexts. Exploring the research problem through the Pragmatist’s philosophical standpoint, this study designed a sequential mixed-methods approach that administered two sets of survey interviews in communities around the Niger Delta to interrogate multiple real-life human experiences. Qualitative evidence is reinforced by questionnaire evidence generated from randomly selected sample population across from a larger geography within and outside the interview survey setting. The different survey evidences are evaluated sequentially through qualitative thematic analysis, complemented and corroborated by quantitative descriptive and inferential statistics. Data analysis results suggest that competing operational property rights dominated by the centralised natural resource management system experience its own capability and enforcement challenges. Thus, while the oil mining activities impose oil spills and gas flaring contaminants on the social-ecological system in the survey setting, the natural resource management approach is widely perceived to be unable to fully enforce its regulations for non-oil related natural resource values impact sustenance and livelihood sources because of the unpredictability of the informal and formal institutions administering the natural resource management system. This thesis provides evidence suggesting the trade-off of non-oil-related natural resource system values discovered social-economic impact on small-scale farming, fishing, and food processing, which threatens the food production value chain food shortages, inflation, unemployment and poverty with spill over to the Nigerian economic systems. Accordingly, from the often-overlooked economic effects of social-ecological system values erosion in natural resource-dependent contexts, this study has demonstrated that the institutional weaknesses underlying the social-economic problems in social-ecological systems around oilfields contexts are rooted in the ineffectiveness level of the governance system capability and enforcement.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | |||||||||
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| Uncontrolled Keywords: | natural resources; oil mining; Nigeria; resource management; social-ecological systems; social-economic impact; small-scale farming; fishing; food processing | |||||||||
| Subjects: | G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GF Human geography. Human ecology. Anthropogeography |
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| Divisions: | Schools and Research Institutes > School of Arts, Culture and Environment | |||||||||
| Depositing User: | Anne Pengelly | |||||||||
| Date Deposited: | 09 Oct 2026 11:41 | |||||||||
| Last Modified: | 09 Oct 2026 11:42 | |||||||||
| URI: | https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/16582 |
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