Gender, Power, and Local Government in Northern Nigeria: Toward a Feminist Political Theory of Grassroots Governance

This dissertation develops an original feminist political theory of grassroots governance to explain the structural mechanisms through which patriarchal power relations in Northern Nigerian society systematically exclude women from local government authority, distort development resource allocation against women's interests, and render existing gender mainstreaming policies ineffective at the local governance level. Despite constitutional gender equality provisions, international commitments under CEDAW and the Beijing Platform, and state-level gender policies, women occupy fewer than five percent of elected positions in Northern Nigerian local government councils, and gender-responsive budget allocations remain nominal across the region. Employing Feminist Political Theory, the Gender Regime Framework, and Postcolonial Feminist Institutionalism, this dissertation conducts an extended qualitative study across fourteen local government areas in Kano, Sokoto, Kebbi, and Bauchi States, gathering data from 100 key informants including women politicians, traditional rulers, religious leaders, state gender desk officers, women's rights advocates, and male local government officials. Life history interviews with twenty women who have navigated local government political participation are combined with ethnographic field observation of council meetings and gender policy implementation processes. Secondary data includes state gender reports, electoral commission gender statistics, and feminist governance literature from West Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. The dissertation's original theoretical contribution is the Patriarchal Local Governance Reproduction Model, explaining how formal institutions, informal social norms, and elite male networks jointly reproduce women's exclusion from effective local governance participation. Keywords: Gender, local government, Northern Nigeria, feminist theory, grassroots governance, patriarchy.