Indigenous Environmental Governance and State Environmental Management: Theorising Institutional Pluralism in Nigerian Forest Communities

This dissertation develops an original theory of institutional pluralism in environmental governance, examining the co-existence, interaction, and tension between indigenous environmental governance systems and formal state environmental management institutions in Nigerian forest communities. Institutional pluralism in natural resource governance, where multiple overlapping governance systems with different authority bases, rules, and logics operate simultaneously over the same resource, is a normal condition in Nigerian forest communities but has been theorised primarily as a coordination problem rather than as a productive governance configuration in its own right. The theoretical contribution reframes institutional pluralism as a potentially beneficial governance condition that can provide resilience, legitimacy, and adaptive capacity that monocentric state governance cannot achieve alone, while also identifying the conditions under which pluralism produces dysfunction rather than benefit. The theoretical framework is constructed through a synthesis of common pool resource theory, legal pluralism theory, and institutional bricolage theory, applied to the specific empirical conditions of Nigerian forest communities through eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in ten communities across Cross River, Ondo, Edo, and Ekiti States. The fieldwork combines participant observation of both indigenous and formal environmental governance processes, 60 in-depth interviews with indigenous governance actors, state agency representatives, and community members, and systematic documentation of governance rule systems in each community. Original theoretical concepts include the legitimacy complementarity mechanism, the jurisdictional boundary bricolage process, and the pluralism vulnerability condition that identifies when institutional overlap generates governance failure. Keywords: institutional pluralism, indigenous governance, environmental management, forest communities, Nigeria.