Consistently unreliable: Oil spill data and transparency discourse

Our recent research reveals enormous discrepancies in oil spill data disclosed by regulatory institutions and corporate sources in Nigeria. Federal agencies as well as major international oil corporations publish inconsistent and sometimes contradictory figures, often employing different spatial or regional categorizations. Uncertainties pertaining to data veracity in the Niger Delta, alongside the thin scientific record inflect deeply contentious debates regarding the country's oil industry. For advocacy organizations, the result is that those seeking to monitor oil spills may spend hours trying to square and cross-reference uneven information, time that could otherwise be spent assessing the scale of impacts and analyzing the complex structural causes surrounding them. Scholarly work in other jurisdictions indicates that the staging of non-transparent, incoherent and/or intentionally misleading data on oil spill risks is not unique to Nigeria, leading to a kind of epistemological vertigo in studying this sector.