A Theory of Adaptive Environmental Governance for the Niger Delta: Institutional Dynamics, Social-Ecological Feedbacks, and Transformative Policy

This dissertation develops an original theoretical framework for adaptive environmental governance in the Niger Delta, integrating institutional analysis, social-ecological systems theory, and political ecology to explain the persistent failure of conventional regulatory approaches and propose transformative governance alternatives. The Niger Delta presents one of the world's most complex environmental governance challenges, where decades of statutory environmental regulation, international corporate responsibility frameworks, and donor-funded remediation programmes have failed to prevent continuing environmental degradation. The theoretical contribution challenges regulatory failure explanations that focus on enforcement capacity deficits alone, arguing instead that governance failures are constitutive of deeper social-ecological system dynamics characterised by resource capture by powerful actors, institutional fragmentation across federal, state, and local levels, and the disruption of indigenous natural resource governance systems that historically maintained ecological balance. The dissertation synthesises Ostrom's polycentric governance theory, Folke's social-ecological resilience framework, and critical political ecology to construct a novel Niger Delta Environmental Governance Framework that identifies the institutional conditions, actor configurations, and feedback mechanisms producing governance lock-in. Empirical grounding is provided by twelve years of secondary data on environmental incident records, institutional documentation, and community livelihood change trajectories, supplemented by primary data collection through fifty interviews with environmental engineers, community leaders, oil company representatives, and regulators. The framework generates seven original theoretical propositions about governance transformation pathways. Operationalising these propositions through a rights-based adaptive governance model constitutes the dissertation's primary policy contribution. Keywords: environmental governance, Niger Delta, adaptive governance, social-ecological systems, institutional theory.