Pipeline Vandalism and the Impact of Oil and Gas Activities on Communities: Community Stakeholders’ Perspectives

This book chapter explores the issues of pipeline vandalism from the perspectives of Bayelsa communities. The book explores how communities view the issues and what they believe leads to pipeline vandalism. The findings of this chapter are based on 21 semi-structured interviews with professional civil society NGO representatives, environmental activists, community leaders, and high-profile community members. The community leaders and high-profile members were recruited because they could narrate and communicate the issues impacting the communities. I concentrated on community leaders and NGO professionals because of security reasons and due to the difficulty convincing the community member that there was no direct monetary benefit for the participants. Further details of the respondents can be found in the methodology chapter. These interviews provide deeper insights and perspectives into the impact of oil and gas activities on local communities. They shed further light on what motivates some youths to vandalise pipelines leading to insecurity problems in Bayelsa. The main themes that emerged from these interviews are; corruption and criminality, lack of socio-economic and political resources, environmental pollution, and community compensation and social injustice. The community respondents were asked about solutions to the problem of oil and gas infrastructure insecurity especially pipeline vandalism in Bayelsa. Most of these themes are broadly consistent with the issues raised within the wider literature (see Chapters 2 , 3 , and 5 ). Using the Critical Discourse Analysis tool, this chapter exhaustively establishes the similarities and dissimilarities between the views and language of the professional and community participants. See the method section in Chapter 4 for details about CDA and its application in qualitative research.