State Fragility and Stakeholder Engagement

Abstract

In situations where government functions are in short supply as with most developing countries particularly Nigeria, issues concerning stakeholder engagement and stakeholder voice are usually on the back burner as a consequence. In this chapter, the authors argues that such landscape is midwifed and sustained by state fragility, which is a situation where government is incapacitated to provide basic social goods as well as infrastructures and enabling institutions that can facilitate corporate-stakeholder engagement and stakeholders' voice amplification. In the Nigerian petroleum industry, this contentious issue are redoubled, given the controversial dynamics of the sector. As this chapter contends, new media (as opposed to old media) has the potentials to facilitate better engagement in corporate-stakeholder dialectics, which can be a harbinger of amplification of stakeholders' voice for sustainable relations and engagement in the industry. In a fragile state, traditional media has a monopoly of information dissemination and sharing, which traditionally limits stakeholder engagement/voice thereby frustrating efforts towards ensuring corporate-stakeholder engagement, corporate responsibility and accountability. Thus, this dilemma can be surmounted with the aid of new media as it is a communication/engagement tool that democratises the discursive space for deliberative corporate-stakeholder relations. It is hoped that this contention will help to illuminate perspectives on how the lingering corporate-stakeholder Catch-22 in Nigeria's petroleum sector can be better managed. Methodologically, literature on main issues in this chapter will be explored and a conceptual framework – stakeholder voice amplification method (SVAM) – will be developed that has the potential to advance knowledge on better corporate-stakeholder engagement in a fragile state such as Nigeria.