Legitimacy, Legality, and Social Licence in Nigerian Petroleum Governance: An Original Theoretical Synthesis

This study theorises the relationship between legal legitimacy, regulatory legality, and social licence in Nigerian petroleum governance, developing an original synthesis that explains how the gap between formal legal frameworks and community-perceived legitimacy drives the governance failures characteristic of Nigeria's petroleum sector. Social licence to operate (SLO) theory, drawn from the mining sector literature, has rarely been systematically applied to the legal dimensions of petroleum governance in sub-Saharan Africa. The research employs a theoretical synthesis methodology, combining systematic review of 120 peer-reviewed articles on SLO, petroleum governance, and legitimacy theory with original qualitative data from fifty community stakeholder interviews across the South South and North Central zones. The study applies legitimacy theory from Beetham and Weber to the petroleum governance context and interrogates the interaction between NUPRC regulatory authority, NNPC Limited's operational legitimacy, and host community social licence claims. The original theoretical synthesis produced is called the Tri-Level Petroleum Legitimacy Framework, distinguishing state-legal, corporate-procedural, and community-substantive legitimacy as interdependent governance requirements. This framework provides a new analytical tool for diagnosing and designing petroleum governance reforms in Nigeria and comparable resource-dependent states. Keywords: legitimacy, social licence, petroleum governance, theoretical synthesis, Nigeria.