Developing an Environmental Management Resilience Framework for Post-Conflict Ecological Recovery in North East Nigeria

This dissertation develops an original environmental management resilience framework for supporting ecological recovery in post-conflict landscapes, with empirical grounding from North East Nigeria where the Boko Haram insurgency and subsequent military operations have created profound environmental management challenges that require a specialised conceptual and practical framework. Post-conflict ecological recovery is a growing environmental management challenge globally, but existing frameworks for environmental management in post-conflict settings are dominated by humanitarian priorities and do not adequately address the long-term ecological recovery management challenge that extends well beyond the humanitarian phase. The original theoretical contribution is the Post-Conflict Environmental Management Resilience Framework, which integrates ecological resilience theory, institutional resilience theory, and community livelihood resilience theory to characterise the multi-dimensional recovery challenge and identify the management interventions most likely to accelerate resilience building across all three dimensions simultaneously. Empirical development of the framework involves eighteen months of multi-site fieldwork in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe States, combining ecological condition assessment at 45 sites representing diverse habitats affected by different conflict intensities, institutional capacity assessment of environmental management agencies at state and LGA levels using participatory institutional analysis, community livelihood resilience assessment using the SL Framework with 240 household interviews, and documentary analysis of humanitarian environmental management records from OCHA and UN Environment Programme. The framework identifies seven resilience-building mechanisms and specifies the sequencing of interventions required across a fifteen-year recovery horizon. Keywords: post-conflict, environmental management resilience, ecological recovery, North East Nigeria, institutional resilience.