Theorising Environmental Vulnerability in Post-Conflict Landscapes: A Framework for North East Nigeria

Existing theories of environmental vulnerability have been developed primarily in stable development contexts and may inadequately capture the distinctive dynamics of vulnerability production in landscapes shaped by prolonged armed conflict, forced displacement, and infrastructure collapse. This study develops an original theoretical framework for conceptualising environmental vulnerability in post-conflict landscapes using North East Nigeria's Lake Chad basin states as the empirical grounding. The research employs a critical realist epistemology and combines an extensive systematic literature review spanning vulnerability theory, conflict ecology, and disaster risk reduction scholarship with primary qualitative data from 60 in-depth interviews with conflict-affected community members, environmental practitioners, and institutional actors across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states. Participatory vulnerability mapping workshops with 120 community participants provide embedded empirical grounding. The proposed framework introduces three theoretically distinctive elements: the concept of compounded vulnerability arising from interaction between conflict-generated and climatically-generated stressors; the notion of institutional void as a mechanism of vulnerability amplification where state environmental governance has collapsed; and the role of displacement-induced environmental knowledge loss in undermining adaptive capacity. The framework is tested against four empirical case communities and refined through iterative comparison. Contributions to theory include integration of political ecology and disaster risk reduction frameworks, empirical demonstration of the non-additivity of conflict and climate vulnerability drivers, and introduction of temporal vulnerability trajectory analysis. The study also evaluates implications of the framework for post-conflict environmental recovery programming by United Nations agencies and Nigerian federal institutions active in the region. Keywords: environmental vulnerability theory, post-conflict ecology, North East Nigeria, disaster risk, institutional void.