Decolonising Forest Governance: Rethinking Property Rights, Sovereignty, and Ecological Citizenship in Post-Colonial Nigerian Forest Law

Nigerian forest governance law retains its fundamental colonial architecture, establishing state property rights over forest resources through instruments designed to dispossess pre-colonial communities of their customary tenure and resource management authority, with enduring consequences for both conservation effectiveness and social justice. This study develops a decolonial theoretical framework for critically analysing property rights, sovereignty claims, and ecological citizenship constructs in Nigerian forest law, and advances proposals for post-colonial legal reform grounded in indigenous jurisprudence. A critical legal studies methodology was applied to systematic doctrinal analysis of federal and state forest legislation from the Forestry Ordinance of 1916 through to the National Forest Policy of 2021, supplemented by comparative analysis of forest governance law reform experiences in Ghana, South Africa, and Bolivia, all of which have undertaken substantive post-colonial legal transformations. Ethnographic fieldwork in six forest communities across three ecological zones documented customary tenure institutions, indigenous resource sovereignty claims, and community conceptions of forest citizenship not captured in the statutory legal framework. Doctrinal analysis reveals that successive Nigerian forest laws have replicated the fundamental colonial assumption of state forest sovereignty while making only superficial procedural concessions to community participation. Customary tenure recognition in current law is narrowly instrumental, limited to benefit-sharing arrangements within a fundamentally unchanged state ownership paradigm. The comparative analysis identifies three reform pathways applicable to Nigeria: constitutional environmental rights entrenchment, recognition of indigenous land and resource sovereignty through specific legislation, and co-management frameworks with genuine shared governance authority. The study contributes original theoretical synthesis between post-colonial legal theory and environmental governance scholarship, providing a rigorous intellectual foundation for transformative forest law reform in Nigeria. Keywords: decolonial theory, forest law, property rights, indigenous sovereignty, post-colonial governance