Thinking and Working Politically: Lessons from FOSTER in Nigeria

The Facility for Oil Sector Transparency and Reform (FOSTER) was a £14 million programme that has helped Nigeria to transform its governance of the oil and gas industry. FOSTER ran from 2011 to mid-2016, and used an explicit ‘thinking and working politically’ (TWP) approach. It was funded by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) and managed by Oxford Policy Management (OPM). This paper seeks to identify the factors that drove – or constrained – FOSTER’s achievements, and asks what this can tell us about TWP, particularly in challenging political and sectoral contexts. FOSTER sought to help strengthen oversight and accountability in Nigeria’s oil sector. It aimed to support reformers within government institutions that ‘supply’ accountability (those governing how oil and gas revenues are collected and managed), and to support civil society organisations, parliament, the media and the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative to ‘demand’ reform. In addition, FOSTER commissioned a series of studies and provided media training to help broaden understanding of the sector and highlight the need for reform. This paper examines the outcomes from five ‘clusters’ of FOSTER interventions. The FOSTER team viewed the first three of these in the list below as successful, whereas the latter two did not deliver on expectations but offer important opportunities for learning: • Support to the Nigerian Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative • Support to demand-side actors to promote transparency and accountability in the oil sector • Support for the passage of the Petroleum Industry Bill • An oil spill-mapping social media project • Support to the Department of Petroleum Resources The analysis drew on 44 semi-structured interviews conducted during a month of fieldwork in Abuja and Lagos; on reviews of the programme’s monitoring, evaluation and learning frameworks; and on newspaper articles and grey literature on Nigeria’s oil sector.2