Public Sector Innovation and Local Government Transformation in Nigeria: An Evolutionary Institutional Approach

This dissertation develops and applies an evolutionary institutional approach to understanding the conditions, mechanisms, and outcomes of public sector innovation adoption in Nigerian local government, examining how organizational learning, institutional entrepreneurship, and environmental selection pressures shape innovation trajectories across councils with different governance contexts. Public sector innovation research has grown rapidly in recent years but remains dominated by Western high-capacity public administration contexts, and the specific dynamics of innovation adoption in low-capacity, politically constrained local governments in developing countries remain theoretically and empirically underexplored. Employing Evolutionary Institutionalism Theory, the Organizational Ecology Model, and the Innovation Diffusion Framework, this study conducts a longitudinal comparative study across eighteen local government areas in Lagos, Kano, and Enugu States that have experimented with different governance innovations over the period 2016 to 2024, including digital revenue systems, community accountability platforms, participatory budgeting pilots, and public-private service delivery partnerships. Primary data is gathered from 90 semi-structured interviews with local government innovators, state government sponsors, innovation failure survivors, and civil society innovation facilitators, supplemented by organizational archival analysis. Secondary data includes innovation evaluation reports, donor program assessments, and comparative African local governance innovation literature. The dissertation's original theoretical contribution is the Local Government Innovation Ecosystem Model, specifying the endogenous and exogenous factors that sustain or extinguish governance innovations in low-capacity political environments. Keywords: Public sector innovation, local government, Nigeria, evolutionary institutionalism, governance transformation.