Environmental Justice, Indigenous Environmental Rights, and Resource Governance in the Oil Palm Belt of Edo State: A Decolonial Analysis

The intersection of environmental justice theory and decolonial scholarship offers a powerful lens for examining how historical land dispossession and ongoing resource governance arrangements in Nigeria's oil palm landscapes perpetuate racialised and class-based environmental burdens on indigenous communities. This doctoral research conducts a decolonial environmental justice analysis of resource governance and environmental rights in the oil palm cultivation landscape of Edo State, South South Nigeria, with particular attention to the claims and experiences of Esan and Edo indigenous communities confronting large-scale agricultural expansion. Extended fieldwork involving 18 months of community immersion, 85 life history interviews, participatory action research with three community groups, and critical analysis of colonial and post-colonial land tenure records forms the primary evidence base. The theoretical framework integrates environmental justice, decolonial ecology, and legal geography to analyse how environmental burdens are distributed, how rights claims are constructed and contested, and how indigenous ecological knowledge is positioned in contemporary resource governance. Original theoretical contributions include the development of an environmental temporality framework capturing how colonial land alienation continues to shape contemporary environmental injustice configurations, and a methodology for decolonial ecological knowledge recovery and validation. Empirical findings document systematic exclusion of indigenous communities from resource royalty sharing, dispossession of forest commons through agribusiness expansion, and criminalisation of customary resource access practices. The study contributes to an emerging decolonial turn in African environmental geography and provides evidence for international human rights mechanisms examining indigenous peoples' environmental rights in West Africa. Keywords: environmental justice, decolonial ecology, indigenous rights, Edo State, resource governance.