Shell Nigeria: Changing the Community Engagement Model

After years of broken promises, environmental mishaps and conflict in the Niger Delta region, Shell’s host communities had little trust in the company—the largest oil and gas producing company in Nigeria. By the late 1990s–early 2000s, the company had suffered reputational damage due to its environmental record in the Delta and in wake of the 1995 execution of Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa by the Nigerian government. By the early 2000s, Shell’s historically paternalistic community engagement model, which required bilateral agreements and multiple interfaces with nearly 1000 host communities, was becoming unsustainable. The company needed to figure out a more effective way of meeting the needs of local communities without compromising its long term position in the region. In 2005, Gloria Udoh, a community development officer at SPDC, Shell’s premier subsidiary in Nigeria, led a team that was charged with proposing a new community engagement model to Shell senior management. With senior management approval, they prepared to implement a pilot programme with communities in the Gbaran-Ubie project, one of Shell’s largest gas projects. How would she and her team gain the trust of communities that had often been at the short end of broken promises for decades? How would she convince community leaders that the new model would benefit them more in the long run than paternalistic handouts? What are the challenges in implementing a new engagement model in the context of a military insurgency in the Niger Delta? “Please leave. We are not willing to discuss with you if you are not going to address the outstanding electricity project.” The reaction of a Chief of the Nembe community as recalled by Shell community development officer Gloria Udoh to Shell’s plans for a new community engagement model in the Niger Delta.