A Comprehensive Theory of Multi-Stakeholder Decision Making for Infrastructure Prioritization in Nigerian Federal States

Infrastructure prioritization decisions in Nigerian federal states involve complex multi-stakeholder political economies where technical merit, political representation, distributional equity, and intergovernmental fiscal dynamics interact in ways that render single-criterion and single-stakeholder optimization models fundamentally inadequate. This dissertation develops a comprehensive theory of multi-stakeholder decision making for infrastructure prioritization, with original theoretical contributions to group decision analysis, social choice theory, and multi-criteria optimization. A foundational critique of existing infrastructure prioritization frameworks reveals their systematic neglect of stakeholder heterogeneity in preference structures, disagreement about criteria weights, and the strategic manipulation of evaluation processes. The dissertation proposes an original multi-stakeholder prioritization theory grounded in preference aggregation under incomplete and inconsistent information, using interval-valued judgments within an extended AHP framework that explicitly models stakeholder disagreement rather than suppressing it. Arrow's impossibility theorem and its implications for multi-stakeholder infrastructure decisions are formally re-examined within the proposed framework, and constructive impossibility avoidance conditions are derived. The theory is empirically instantiated through a case study of transportation and water infrastructure prioritization across six geopolitical zones in Nigeria, using preference data collected from 94 stakeholders representing federal, state, local government, civil society, and private sector perspectives. Original algorithms for computing consensus rankings under bounded rationality and strategic preference misrepresentation are developed and tested. This dissertation contributes original theory to operations research, decision science, and public infrastructure governance in federal systems. Keywords: multi-stakeholder decision making, infrastructure prioritization, AHP, social choice theory, Nigeria