Institutional and Regulatory Compliance Gaps in Natural Resource Governance: Empirical Evidence and Lessons from the Nigeria Oil and Gas Industry

Institutional governance has traditionally been frequently undermined by developing countries, but this behaviour has immensely impacted economic growth and development outcome with long term implications. More fundamentally, the Nigeria oil and gas industry governance are beset with various challenges including regulatory compliance, monitoring capacity, enforcement mechanism, politics and very frequently plagued with blame games. Consequently, the study conducted primary and secondary data to problematized gaps in institutional governance from the standpoint of development discourse to establish a convergence of evidences within the context of the quality of state institutions that unarguably reflects the Nigeria scenario. Institutional and regulatory compliance gaps permeate the gamut of the oil and gas industry so resolutely in the global South like Nigeria, orchestrated by the political elites who are so perverse, rent seeking, inept and greed driven with no clear sense of patriotism compare to the global North like Norway that is more effective and nationalistic. The findings of the study highlight weaknesses in policy framework, corrupt practices, poor contract management, compromised professional integrity, inadequate funding, poor contract management and systemic gap in revenue management as a consequence of gaps in natural resources governance in the oil and gas industry in Nigeria. It explains this on the basis of existing mechanisms and empirical evidences. These evidently exemplify that Nigeria has struggled for several decades from lethargic institutional and regulatory compliance capacity as the presence of oil and gas does not translate or appear to systematically support development outcome in many developing countries.