Alero Akporiaye, Ph.D.
aakporia@risd.edu
Rhode Island School of Design
Country: United States (Rhode Island)
Research Interests
Political Economy
Experimental Research
Political Risk
Oil Politics
Corporate Social Responsibility
Experimental Research
Multinational Corporations
Foreign Direct Investment
My Research:
I study the politics surrounding foreign direct investment in several contexts: political risk, multinational corporations and violence, corporate social responsibility, oil politics. I am a quantitative international political economist and also use experimental methods in my work.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
Oil production often triggers socioeconomic upheaval, manifested as grievances and conflict that can disrupt a company’s operations. I utilize Stakeholder Theory and the Social License to Operate to contextualize why oil companies turn to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to mitigate such conflict. They use what is often described as the “business case”-seeking to prioritize their commercial interests while addressing harms from extraction-to justify pursuing CSR, which, they maintain, facilitates production and enables them to pursue their profit-seeking interests. Does CSR benefit the commercial interests of oil companies? I hypothesize that CSR activity does increase oil production and test this expectation using a sample of oil-producing countries and a novel measure of CSR developed from the literature. I find weak evidence in support of CSR facilitating oil production. My analysis reveals that oil production drives the need for CSR, findings which challenge the key arguments put forward in support of the business case (for CSR) in this sector.
Global human health threats, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, necessitate coordinated responses at multiple levels. Public health professionals and other experts broadly agree about actions needed to address such threats, but implementation of this advice is stymied by systemic factors such as prejudice, resource deficits, and high inequality. In these cases, crises like epidemics may be viewed as opportunities to spark structural changes that will improve future prevention efforts. However, crises can also weaken governance and reinforce systemic failures. In this paper, we use the concept of the governance treadmill to demonstrate cross-level dynamics that help or hinder the alignment of capacities toward prevention during public health crises. We find that variation in capacities and responses across local, national, and international levels contributes to the complex evolution of global and local health governance. Where capacities are misaligned, effective local prevention of global pandemic impacts tends to be elusive in the short term, and multiple cycles of crisis and response may be required before capacities align toward healthy governance. We demonstrate that this transition requires broader societal adaptation, particularly towards social justice and participatory democracy.
We examine the spread and persistence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to mitigate oil conflict, despite its failures. Our work challenges the ideas versus interests debate, arguing for a third way in which reinforcing feedbacks between ideas (problem narratives) and interests (power disconnects) interact to shape the persistence of failed CSR. Using Ogoniland, Nigeria, as a case study, we present novel findings showing that Shell and the Nigerian government developed problem narratives for CSR that reinforces rather than narrows existing power disconnects. In contrast, as those most negatively affected by oil extraction, the Ogoni people have a more complex understanding of the problems associated with extraction and the necessary solutions. Therefore, they are disappointed with failed CSR applications practiced by Shell since 1997 and continue to protest ongoing impacts of oil extraction. Oil companies need to change their problem narratives and concede more power to communities, and governments should cease enabling failed CSR strategies. Additionally, governments should reflect on and address the role they play in enabling CSR as a failed strategy, whether they are oil-producing host countries such as Nigeria or oil-consuming home countries such as Holland. Last, we discuss the generalizability of our theoretical framework and propose that the international community could play a role in narrowing domestic power disconnects.
Political unrest in the Niger Delta has long been viewed as a hurdle for extracting maximum value from Nigeria's oil resources. Recently, investors and policymakers have laid blame for sector under-performance on pipeline sabotage and theft, and sounded the alarm for an impending ‘oil crisis’. However, our understanding of the economic effects of social action against oil companies is incomplete. Rigorous analysis has not heretofore been offered as evidence for such dire futures. Despite the obvious risk of pipeline interdiction, price dynamics and aggregate production respond minimally to pipeline interdiction. Based on quantitative analysis of the relationship among price, production and pipeline interdiction from multiple data sources covering different time intervals (monthly data from 2005 to 2014 and annual data from 1999 to 2013), we find no evidence of significant effects of pipeline interdiction on production and a weak relationship between pipeline interdiction and Bonny light crude prices. Reported losses in product are substantial, but there is no evidence of statistically significant impacts on price or production in the aggregate. Explanations for this counterintuitive result are cast in terms of sector resilience. The implications of this finding for producer risk and the likelihood of an impending ‘oil crisis’ are discussed.