In developing countries, ensuring impacted communities can achieve lasting benefits from petroleum developments becomes increasingly challenging as production declines over time and fewer resources are available. In Papua New Guinea, ChevronTexaco has learned important lessons from its efforts to assist the rural communities surrounding oilfield operations and exploration there. The license areas are surrounded by a total of 83 scattered villages and 13 language groupings in remote, tropical rainforests with limited access to basic social services such as healthcare and education.
ChevronTexaco established social development programs to address the communities' needs, working with local government officials and other social development agencies wherever possible. Many of the company's earliest efforts focused on filling the gaps between community needs and the capacity of local social service providers to address them. Such direct assistance however, promotes increasing community reliance on the company's support and is not sustainable past the life of oil and gas production in the area.
Internal and external reviews of lessons learned identified the need to focus efforts on capacity building of local institutions to provide sustainable development assistance to the impacted communities.
ChevronTexaco recognized the importance of establishing a separate vehicle for capacity building that would be able to effectively draw upon support from a network of government and non-government organizations. In the face of declining operating budgets, such a vehicle would need to develop its own capacity to be self-sustaining over time, ensuring the social impacts of declining production and associated benefit streams can be effectively addressed in an environment of continued cost reduction.
This paper identifies the lessons learned and resulting model ChevronTexaco has developed to address its strategic commitments to ensuring sustainable development is achieved in Papua New Guinea without compromising its strategic commitments to continued cost-efficiency and profitable operations.
Oil companies operating in rural areas of developing countries are often faced with the challenge of addressing the social needs of the communities surrounding their operations. In the early stages of a petroleum development, the Developer's commitment to being a responsible corporate member of those communities usually results in some form of assistance to those communities to help them meet those needs. As production declines over time however, the Developer's available resources to meet those needs also decline. Communities who have become reliant on the Developer's efforts are faced with the uncertain sustainability of this support while NGOs and government BLOCK 4 - -