Inclusive policy making process for sustainable development: Empirical cases of oil and infrastructure sectors in Nigeria

The significance of enhancing stakeholder's engagement to lessen influence of conflict and improve policy ownership has been demonstrated in exiting literature. Nevertheless, effective stakeholder interaction goes beyond involvement but entails paying careful attention to particular policy that fits context. These initiatives demand emphasis on institutions and how message is designed and diffused, which has been ignored by exiting studies. Therefore, this study mainly concentrates on answering the question "how stakeholders interact with institutions in policy making process in less-developed communities?". The stakeholder's theory, institutional theory and diffusion of innovation theory was integrated as lenses to understand stakeholders and institutional influence on policy. The institutional analysis and development framework was used to explicate action arena, conditions and outcome that ensue from institutional interaction as discerned by significant stakeholders. 77 semi-structured interviews were conducted with key stakeholders in oil and infrastructure sectors. Eight policy formation meetings were observed to understand factors such as social context where policies are deliberated, issues included on agenda, participants invited for meetings, role of authorities and processes of engagement. Duration of observation varied, some sessions lasted between 60-90 minutes. Documentary analysis was used to triangulate findings to provide further information. The findings show that socio-economic transformation in developing communities is influenced by active inclusive participation of actors, institutional localizations and adoption effective policy diffusion strategies. In the oil sector, there was active stakeholder and end-user participation, with policy diffusion instituted on direct bilateral communications and feedback with community, and information dissemination through opinion leaders of various socio-economic groups for policy improvement and acceptance. Contrarily, government agencies predominated policy making in infrastructure sector, instead policy diffusion was mainly communicated only through traditional leaders lacking prior end-user consultation. The non-exclusion of stakeholders and end-users in infrastructure development sector resulted in poor policy implementation such as oversight of needs assessment, environmental impact assessment and social impact assessment. These institutions significantly influence diffusion of policy in terms of designing communication strategies not only for information (in/out) flow among stakeholder but also to provide avenue to showcase and test existing programs in other communities to demonstrate relative advantages to potential adopters. The stakeholder's theory indicated that firms and communities are important stakeholders that effect policies. However, the stakeholder's theory did not explain who is considered as a key stakeholder. Stakeholder theory also did not indicate how were key stakeholders determined by institutional mechanism. This thesis contributes to the literature to improve understanding on the way that institutions effect, and are influenced by, stakeholders' interaction in developing policy in emerging society, which has not received sufficient attention. This thesis makes theoretical contribution to stakeholder theory by describing that knowledge of important stakeholders is insufficient without first understanding and communication with salient stakeholders through postpolicy implementation that influence policy performance. This study supports institutional theory and diffusion of innovation theory that institutional controls and bottom-up persuasion strategies sufficiently improves policy determinants. Therefore, policy makers must recognize that stakeholder engagement does not translate to policy effectiveness. There is a need for proper institutional design comprising explicit stipulation of industry norms, regulatory oversight from stakeholders, active inclusion of end-users in policy making process, and emulation of best practices from within and outside the industry. Institutional structures must be collectively planned and implemented from end-user perspective (bottom-up). This can be attained by incorporating relative advantage of policies, policy compatibility test, needs assessments and exerting mimetic pressure on practices to enshrine healthy competition that focuses on providing improved social services that benefits communities as well as hold firms socially responsible. Finally, this thesis has contributed to existing body of knowledge by demonstrating that policy effectiveness is determined not only by stakeholder engagement, but also through optimized institutional analysis and policy diffusion mechanism to enhance policy implementation.