The Impact of Industrial Projects on Empowerment of Local Communities (Case Study: Shazand Refinery)

Empowerment is one of the new development paradigm components which today is a central concept in the discourse and practices of development. And is return from top-down planning procedure to bottom-up planning procedure in development approaches and endogenous development. This study intends to evaluate the effects of the oil and gas industry on empowerment in Shazand region. Empowerment is measured in two dimensions: agency and opportunity structure. The indicators of these two dimensions are social capacity, economical capacity, human capacity, ecological capacity, physical capacity and opportunity structure. The research methodology is description and quantitative analysis by using questionnaire. Based on the Cochran formula the sample size is 378 and multi-stage sampling was used. The findings of the study showed the social capacity with an average of 2.51, the economical capacity with an average of 2.73 and human capacity with an average of 2.49 are on medium level after building refinery. Physical capacity with an average of 2.06, ecological capacity with an average of 1.54 and opportunity structure with an average of 1.98 were extremely undesirable. In general, the empowerment of this region which is affected by Shazand refinery is moderate and downward and there is a wide distance with desirable level. In other words, the weak interaction between the oil industry and the local community causes the low impact on the local community empowerment.