Agenda 21, which was the major output of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, has remained a blueprint for sustainable development into the 21st century among member states of the United Nations. Different countries of the UN system had so far responded in different ways and in different measures to the prescription of the Rio Conference.

The year 2002 marked the 10th year anniversary of the Earth Summit. Celebrated in South Africa as the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) or Rio + 10, it offered governments, development practitioners, professionals of different leanings, civil society organisations, etc., throughout the world, an opportunity to gather and take stock of the status of sustainable development ten years after Rio. It was, therefore, an opportunity to appraise sustainable development issues at the international, regional, national and local levels as the case may be.

This book, Post-Rio Realities of Sustainable Development in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria, is Rio + 10 publication which, appearing in the months after the WSSD, is still highly relevant in the assessment of the current developmental paradigms and practices in the Niger Delta Region of Nigeria.

Currently, two major voices seem to dominate debate and reportage on the overall state of the environment and socio-economic development in the study area. The first voice is that of government (particularly federal), and its agencies. The other, is that of the multinational crude petroleum producing companies, which extract and market millions of barrels of oil per day from this ecologically sensitive wetland region of the country.

This book is not, and has not been intended to be a protest literature. Rather, it has been written in keeping with established academic tradition, as an objective civil society assessment of the practice of sustainable development in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. A wide range of recommendations for the improvement of the socio-economic well-being of the region, have been made at the end of most of the chapters. These are intended to be a further guide to the rapid socio-economic transformation of the study area.

This publication is directed at a large spectrum of readers. These include academics, development practitioners, donor agencies, politicians, NGOs, and other civil society groups, including the organised private sector, public servants, public policy makers and researchers working in the field of human socio-economic development.