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Edited by Arild Underdal, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway, and approved October 4, 2019 (received for review May 15, 2019)
Significance
Many international organizations urge companies in the oil, gas, and mining sectors to engage with local communities, and they issue “best practices” guidelines for doing so. However, reliable information about the impact of stakeholder engagement on participant communities is limited. This paper rigorously examines, through a randomized controlled trial, whether communities benefit from these efforts.
Abstract
This study evaluates the effectiveness of a Stakeholder Engagement (SE) intervention in improving outcomes for communities affected by oil and gas extraction in Western Uganda. The study design is a randomized controlled trial where villages are randomly assigned to a treatment group (participating in SE) or a control group (not participating). Data are collected via household surveys at baseline and end line in 107 villages in the Albertine Graben. We find that SE improves transparency, civic activity, and satisfaction with issues that most concern the people under study. While satisfaction has improved, it is too early to ascertain whether these interventions improve long-term outcomes. These results are robust when controlling for spillover effects and other subregional fixed effects.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: ecoleman{at}fsu.edu.
Author contributions: E.A.C., J.M., and A.R.P. designed research; J.M. performed research; E.A.C. and B.S. analyzed data; and E.A.C., A.R.P., and B.S. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data and replication files have been deposited on the Harvard dataverse website and can be accessed at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/DEGFVP.
This article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1908433116/-/DCSupplemental.
Published under the PNAS license.
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Stakeholder engagement increases transparency, satisfaction, and civic action
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