Appraising Local Content Development in In-Country Capacity Growth: A Review of the NCDMB's Ten-Year Strategic Road Map (2017-2026)

The Ten-Year Strategic Road Map of the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) is a strategic policy framework, whose aim is to increase Nigerian content in the oil and gas industry from 26% in 2017 to 70% by 2027. Its goal is to catalyse Nigerian industrial base and have a retention of 70% of industry growth in-country and create over 300,000 jobs. The objective of this work is to assess the growth of the NCDMB's local content policy between 2017-2026. The study embraced developmental state theory, regulatory theory, and energy justice theory as frameworks to investigate the local content growth in Nigeria within the period under review. A quantitative literature review methodology was adopted. Findings revealed that despite being legally substantively based, the Nigerian oil and gas Industry Content Development Act (NOGICD) 2010, an enabling legislation of the NCDMB, and the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) 2021 have jointly contributed in the persistence of the lack of an effective enforcement system, institutional overlap, and elite appropriation of the stakeholder processes to the Road Map. The study recommended collaboration between the NCDMB and Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Agency (NUPRC), so as to address the problems associated with institutional overlap. The PIA Act 2021 should be reviewed to clearly define institutional boundaries to create unified approval windows to avoid duplication of roles and also the Act should incorporate the NCDMB into the Board of the Host Community Development Trust, as the NOGICD Act 2010 entrusts it with Capacity building mandate in developing in-country capacities and capabilities for the industrialization of Nigeria. The paper concluded by drawing a comparative analysis from the adaptive policy of some c