Beyond Good Governance: Rethinking Local Development Administration in Africa Through a Postcolonial Institutional Lens with Evidence from Nigeria

This dissertation proposes a fundamental rethinking of local development administration theory in Africa by applying a postcolonial institutional lens to critique and transcend the dominant Good Governance paradigm, drawing on empirical evidence from local governance across Nigeria's six geopolitical zones. The Good Governance agenda, promoted by international development institutions since the 1990s, prescribes a set of universalized institutional attributes for effective local governance including transparency, accountability, rule of law, participation, and efficiency. Yet this dissertation argues that these prescriptions are embedded in liberal democratic assumptions that poorly fit the historical, cultural, and political realities of African local governance contexts, producing reform programs that fail to take root in endogenous institutional logics. Employing Postcolonial Theory, Decolonial Governance Studies, and the Hybrid Governance Framework, this study conducts an extended qualitative study across thirty local government areas, gathering data from 120 key informants including academics, governance practitioners, traditional leaders, civil society actors, and community members. Archival analysis covers colonial governance records, post-independence reform documents, and international development organization governance assessment reports. Discourse analysis, comparative case methodology, and theory-building grounded analysis are applied. The dissertation's original contribution is the Postcolonial Local Governance Framework, which integrates indigenous institutional logics, relational accountability systems, and community sovereignty principles as alternative organizing concepts for local development administration in Africa. Findings are expected to challenge the universal applicability of Western governance indicators and propose endogenous governance quality metrics. Keywords: Postcolonial theory, local development administration, good governance, Africa, Nigeria, institutional theory.