Significance of the Study

Environmental conservation has been the focus by the states and the governments across the world (Ringquist, 2016). However, the balance between sustaining the economic activities that could lead to pollution has been a challenge as these activities such as mining that drives the economy of the relevant countries are usually prone to contaminating the surrounding. The different environmental bodies have called upon each country to spearhead the conservation agenda for the future generations through implementations of strategic policies that champion for the protection of the environment (Sachs, 2015). Therefore, this research proposal is based on an evaluation of the environmental policies put in place by the Nigerian government on protecting the Niger Delta based on the case study of oil extraction and environmental issues in the Niger Delta. It is worth knowing that every mention of the environmental aspects in Nigeria, the gas and oil industry comes in mind since these products are reported to account for roughly 90 per cent of the countries revenue. This implies that the extraction of oil and gas, which is approximated to be two million barrels every day, cannot be foregone as the major economic activity for the Nigerian demographics.

With this significant knowledge in mind, it brings attention to the importance of formulating and evaluating the necessary environmental policies that would promote oil and gas extraction for economic gains as well as providing the means and measures that would protect the environment. Additionally, with the Delta region being densely populated, it puts many lives at risk due to the long-term effects of air pollutants as well as the destruction of the aquatic lives as pointed out by (Meena et al., 2018, pp.1-15). The oil and gas industry is critical to the health of the people with the absence of suitable strategies and policies that can protect the environment against pollution.

The study of the fundamental principles of the Nigerian environmental policy is highly significant as it ensures a sustainable socioeconomic advancement based on effective management of resources. Additionally, the findings of the study could be significant since they would guide the stakeholders or the players in the industry in critical planning and management in a way that provides a balance between immediate and the remote environment. The evaluation could also lead to recommendations on obsolete policies or rectification of the existing policies to suit the current need for environmental protection.

To evaluate the policies and strategies on environmental pollution by the Nigerian government. Another aim of this proposal is to come an effective blueprint to the actual study that would provide insights to the proposed research topic on the evaluation of the Nigerian environmental policies and the strategies that would lead to the long-term protection of the Niger Delta. Another

Research Aims

The core objective of this proposal is to provide guidance that would be adopted during the actual study on an evaluation of the environmental policies in Nigeria. This would ensure that the research remains within the scope of the research questions and topic for arriving at the reliable findings and results (O’Leary, 2018). Moreover, another objective of this proposal also evaluate and provide the appropriate and suitable methodology to be used by the researcher during the actual study as demonstrated by (Quinlan, Babin, Carr, and Griffin, 2018). This would ensure a proper preparation with the establishment of the potential limitations that might arise and the estimated time/budget required for the study.

1. What is the relevance of evaluating environmental policies with regard to mining?
2. Are the existing policies effective enough to achieve the required standards of the environmental conservation in the Niger Delta?
3. What are the challenges facing the implementation of the existing environmental policies?

The development of environmental regulatory framework and policies in Nigeria

The literature reviews depict that the environmental policies and the legal frameworks were developed into three stages and are prone to evaluation by any interested stakeholders under the consent of the state (Sam, Prpich, and Coulon, 2015, pp.427-428). The first stage of development was referred to as the pre-1988 that was defined by lack of total public awareness on the significance of conservation. The scholars claim that the aspects such biodiversity, pollution abatement, effluent limitations and the sustainable development of the natural resources were not a concern in the Nigerian public domain. However, there was no national policies and by extension the agency responsible for ensuring the environmental conservation through treatment of wastes before discharge especially in the exploration and processing of crude oil. As a result, there has been continued efforts to document the environmental challenges dating back in 1960’s as a pathway to the formulation, implementing, and evaluation of the environmental policies to address the challenges in conserving the environment.

The pathway for the formulation of the policies led to the formation of the Petroleum Act 1969 that entails the regulations of controlling pollution in the mining operations to protect the watercourse and the atmosphere. Additionally, the other regulations provided by the Petroleum Act include the Drilling and Production Regulations 1969, The Mineral Oils Safety Regulation 1963, The Petroleum Regulations 1967, and the Petroleum Refining Regulations 1974. (Sam, coulon, and Prpich, 2016, pp.916-925) The objectives of these regulatory standards were to establish the guidelines for quality control in the petroleum industry concerning planned monitoring of environmental conservation, to come up with an integrated volume and materials on pollution abatement technologies for the industry, and to standardize the abatement of pollution and evaluation procedures for various parameters.

Objectives of the Proposal

The second generation of the regulatory frameworks precedes the establishment of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency in 1988 due to the emerging of the global environmental policies and strategies. The principle had provisions that declared commitment of the country to the policies that could uphold sustainable development basing on the effective management of the environments. The policies dictated that the environmental aspects be integrated into economic decision-making processes, employment of economic instruments in managing the natural resources, and application of environmental friendly technologies. The policy further required that assessment of the impacts on the environment be carried out before implementation of any major project.

The third generation is the expected adjustments in the existing regulation through implementing the Local Content Act or the Petroleum Industry Bill (Adedeji et al., 2016, pp.61-73). The Act entails the promotion of local skills through technology transfer, local manufacturing and the use of local labour in the manufacturing industry. The objective of the Nigerian government through this Act is to increase the involvement and the participation of the citizens in the mining industry that would benefit the Nigerians through the private companies thus contributing to the economic growth (Sidique, Rahman, and Hook, 2015, pp.425-437). Additionally, the scholars claim that the move to increase the local participation in the industry would bring to the attention of the local people and desire to conserve the environment for the future generations.

Moreover, the local Act facilitated the review of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of 1992 among other instruments that aim at implementing suitable policies in all the states and the local authorities and encouraging the innovation of procedure for the exchange of information across the environmental conservation agencies thus facilitating collaboration and effectiveness. The scholars ascertain that the EIA Act 1992 was the first legislative piece that led to the administration of inconvertible policies for the socioeconomic activities including the gas and oil sector (Nzeadibe et al., 2015, pp.74-83). Additionally, the Act has aided in creating the level of awareness among all the stakeholders on environmental strategies and policies as well as creating a sound regulatory framework for ensuring all the projects conform to the conservation policies.

Some scholars have single out the overlap of authorities as one of the major setbacks facing the implementation of the environmental policies and strategies (Elenwo, Ikechukwu, and Akankali, 2014, p.884). It has been pointed out that the conflicts between the federal/local government and the ministries/agencies such as the NAFDAC versus FEPA over their responsibilities in environmental conservation is a great challenge to implementation of the policies for effective outcomes. Moreover, the duplication of the policies among different agencies has made it cumbersome and stagnation of enforcing the policies to their respective functions. Another cited challenge is the lack of adequate environmental information among the local crude oil processing communities. This has led to rampant ignorance of the environmental legislations thus increasing the rate of pollution, which is attributed to the lack of access to pollution information.

Research Question

(Goldthau, 2016) Illustrated that another challenge to the implementation of the environmental policies is the bureaucratic obstacles such as the delay in the release of the environmental conservation funds. He narrated that this results in compounded ecological problems due to accumulated disposal or discharge of pollutants such as the hydrocarbons that may persist for decades. For instance, the studies ascertain that the Ejama-Ebubu, in essences, one of the mining sites in Eleme local government that exhibits hefty contamination for nearly forty years after the occurrence of an oil spill despite regular attempts for cleanup activities (Owolabi and Okonkwo, 2014). The timely release of funds for funds could prevent the occurrence of such incidences through timely purchase and maintenance of the oil and gas processing facilities.

Research philosophy 

The research would be based on the positivism philosophy that subscribes to the use of highly structured and large samples of data that can be measured using the quantitative method as well as qualitative techniques (Hughes and Sharrock, 2016). The philosophy would facilitate flexibility in the data collection and analysis in line with the research questions and objectives. The preferred positivism philosophy over the other philosophies is shown in the research onion below.

The inductive research approach would be deployed which is also known as inductive reasoning that starts with an observation to come up with the theories that would be applied during the research process. The approach involves the search for the relevant pattern in the study through observations and then develop explanations from these observations through a number of hypotheses as acknowledged by (Woiceshyn and Daellenbach, 2018, pp.183-195). For instance, during the evaluation of a highlighted policy, the approach would enable the research to alter the direction of the research process in case the defined scope does not lead to answering the research questions and objectives.

The research strategies would be used to introduce the main components of the study, which are the evaluation of the environmental policies and the focus perspectives. The research strategy enables the researcher on how to implement the proposed methodology to answer the research questions. The main research strategies that would be used are the case studies, the action-oriented research, the quantitative survey, and the qualitative interviews to complete the study (Bell, Bryman, and Harley 2018). These can be presented below to indicate their link to the research question.

The case study research strategy would help to investigate the environmental issues

Literature Review

in the oil extraction in the Niger Delta as the main case study.

(Cuaresma, 2017, pp.226-236) argues that the times taken to accomplish the research is independent of the research methodology selected in the study. The application of the cross-sectional option of time horizon would be deployed to obtain information on different aspects or variables at the same time. This would imply collecting data on more than a single point by the teams at the same time due to the time constraints of the proposed research. However, the longitudinal study option of the time horizon would be applied to only those variables or aspects that calls for observation of trends before data is collected to examine the change processes.

The preferred methods of data collection are observation and the questionnaires whereby the semi-structured questions would be designed for interviewing the participants. The semi-structured questions would enable the research to stick to the scope of the study as well as provide the chance for varied explanations from the respondents for gathering insightful information (Lewis, 2016, pp.45-58). The audio recording would be used to capture the oral interviews as well as the taking of snapshots and video recording during data collection. Moreover, the systematic sampling method would be used to identify the respondents across the entire Delta region thus ensuring full representation of the population sample as acknowledged by (Csikszentmihalyi and Larson, 2014, pp.35-54).  

The proposed data analysis technique including but not limited to the textual analysis that would combine the advantages and utilisation of both qualitative and quantitative analyses (Siano and Wysocki, 2018). This would enable the researcher to use critical thinking in drawing judgments and the application of computational methods to extract the grammatical or semantic relationships between the words and figures to find patterns and meaning of the data for interpretation.

The prosed research is expected to take a timeline of ten weeks as indicated in the Gantt chart below.

Project schedule
Activity	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	Week 5	Week 6	Week 7	Week 8	Week 9	Week 10
Forming groups and discussing of dissertation ideas
Finding a good research question
Refining the research question
Formalising the dissertation(introduction)
Literature review
Methodology 1
Methodology 2
Strategies for time management
Carrying out the dissertation
Wrapping up and posters

The findings and results of the proposed study could be unreliable for replicating the results to similar cases due to the time limitation. The evaluations of the implemented policies could require a longer time than the assigned ten weeks since most governments initiated policies take a longer time to be implemented. Concisely, this would imply the study would lack a control experiment or study since it is likely that the assigned time could not be enough to manipulate the existing policies for comparison. Additionally, the time limitation would result in usage of a small data sample instead of the proposed larger samples thus resulting in inconclusive findings that could not be reliable for replication.

The research would indulge voluntary interviews during the data collection where the participants would be informed in advance about the purpose of the study and the importance of the findings that would be obtained. Additionally, the researchers would ensure that the study protects the privacy of the respondents through the integrity values that would ensure they are protected from any form of psychological or physical harm according to the code of ethics in research (Department of Health, 2014). Moreover, the students would seek clearance letter from the relevant authorities including the Nigerian Mining and Petroleum departments before conducting the study.

References

Adedeji, A.N., Sidique, S.F., Rahman, A.A. and Law, S.H., 2016. The role of local content policy in local value creation in Nigeria’s oil industry: A structural equation modeling (SEM) approach. Resources Policy, 49, pp.61-73.

Bell, E., Bryman, A. and Harley, B., 2018. Business research methods. Oxford university press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Larson, R., 2014. Validity and reliability of the experience-sampling method. In Flow and the foundations of positive psychology (pp. 35-54). Springer, Dordrecht.

Cuaresma, J.C., 2017. Income projections for climate change research: A framework based on human capital dynamics. Global Environmental Change, 42, pp.226-236.

Department of Health, E., 2014. The Belmont Report. Ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. The Journal of the American College of Dentists, 81(3), p.4.

Elenwo, E.I. and Akankali, J.A., 2014. Environmental policies and strategies in Nigeria oil and gas industry: gains, challenges and prospects. Natural Resources, 5(14), p.884.

Goldthau, A. ed., 2016. The handbook of global energy policy. John Wiley & Sons.

Hughes, J.A. and Sharrock, W.W., 2016. The philosophy of social research. Routledge.

Lewis, G., 2016. The Studies. In Disaffection with School Mathematics (pp. 45-58). SensePublishers, Rotterdam.

Meena, R.A.A., Sathishkumar, P., Ameen, F., Yusoff, A.R.M. and Gu, F.L., 2018. Heavy metal pollution in immobile and mobile components of lentic ecosystems—a review. Environmental Science and Pollution Research, pp.1-15.

Nzeadibe TC, Ajaero CK, Okonkwo EE, Okpoko PU, Akukwe TI, Njoku-Tony RF. Integrating community perceptions and cultural diversity in social impact assessment in Nigeria. Environmental Impact Assessment Review. 2015 Nov 1;55:74-83.

O’Leary, Z., 2018. Research Proposal: Little Quick Fix. SAGE.

Owolabi, T.O.S. and Okonkwo, E.C., 2014. Compensation for Environmental Pollution and Justice Procurement in the Niger delta area of Nigeria: the Mass Media Role. Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa, 16(7).

Quinlan, C., Babin, B., Carr, J. and Griffin, M., 2018. Business research methods. South Western Cengage.

Ringquist, E.J., 2016. Environmental Protection at the State Level: Politics and Progress in Controlling Pollution: Politics and Progress in Controlling Pollution. London: Routledge.

Sachs, W., 2015. Planet dialectics: Explorations in environment and development. Zed Books Ltd..

Sam, K., Coulon, F. and Prpich, G., 2016. Working towards an integrated land contamination management framework for Nigeria. Science of The Total Environment, 571, pp.916-925.

Sam, K., Prpich, G. and Coulon, F., 2015. Environmental and Societal Management of contaminated land in Nigeria: the need for policy and guidance changes. In 4th International Contaminated Site Remediation Conference: Program and Proceedings (pp. 427-428). Melbourne Australia.

Siano, F. and Wysocki, P.D., 2018. The Primacy of Numbers in Financial and Accounting Disclosures: Implications for Textual Analysis Research.

Sidique, S.F., Rahman, A.A. and Hook, L.S., 2015. Relationship among local content policy, indigenous oil firms’ participation and job creation in nigeria: A theoretical concept. The Journal of Developing Areas, 49(4), pp.425-437.

Woiceshyn, J. and Daellenbach, U., 2018. Evaluating inductive vs deductive research in management studies: Implications for authors, editors, and reviewers. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, 13(2), pp.183-195