The Political Economy of Local Government Reform in Nigeria: Actors, Interests, and Institutional Change from 1976 to 2024

This dissertation investigates the political economy of local government reform in Nigeria from the landmark 1976 Local Government Reforms to the present, examining how organized political interests, federal-state power dynamics, and the structural logic of patrimonial governance have shaped the trajectory, content, and outcomes of reform initiatives across five decades. Existing literature treats Nigerian local government reform primarily as a technical and administrative phenomenon, insufficiently theorizing the ways in which political actors strategically deploy and resist reform to protect existing power distributions. Employing the Historical Institutionalism Theory and the Veto Players Framework, this research applies a process tracing methodology across four distinct reform eras: the military reform period, the transition to democracy era, the post-1999 constitutional consolidation period, and the contemporary autonomy reform movement. Data is gathered from 60 elite interviews with former ministers of intergovernmental affairs, constitutional lawyers, state governors, local government chairmen associations, and civil society reform advocates, supplemented by archival analysis of government gazettes, constitutional conference records, and legislative committee reports. The study makes an original theoretical contribution by developing a Political Economy of Local Government Reform Model that explains reform failure as a rational equilibrium outcome of actor interest configurations rather than a consequence of policy design failure. Findings are expected to demonstrate that the federal system creates structural incentives for state governors to capture local government resources and elections, making autonomous local government reform politically self-defeating under current constitutional arrangements. Recommendations target the constitutional architecture of reform enabling conditions. Keywords: Political economy, local government reform, historical institutionalism, Nigeria, institutional change.