Theorising Carbon Governance in Tropical Forest Nations: Evidence from Nigeria’s REDD+ Readiness Process

Carbon governance through REDD+ in tropical forest nations generates novel configurations of environmental authority, market mechanisms, and community rights that existing theoretical frameworks from international relations, political ecology, and institutional economics only partially explain. This doctoral research theorises carbon governance by analysing Nigeria's decade-long REDD+ readiness process across federal, state, and community scales through a critical political economy lens combined with discourse analysis and institutional ethnography. Research design combines analysis of the full documentary archive of Nigeria's REDD+ readiness activities from 2009 to 2024, 95 semi-structured interviews with federal and state officials, international donors and consultants, civil society organisations, and community representatives in Cross River, Edo, and Ondo states, and four months of participant observation within the Nigerian REDD+ secretariat. The study develops an original theory of selective forest sovereignty, which captures how REDD+ creates differentiated and contested claims to forest carbon value that intersect with existing rights systems in ways that simultaneously strengthen some actors' positions while foreclosing others. Empirical findings document how international carbon accounting requirements structure and constrain domestic forest governance reform, creating path dependencies that limit genuinely transformative governance change. The study critically evaluates how Nigeria's reference emission level setting and forest monitoring systems encode particular political settlements about forest resource control. Methodological contributions include a framework for institutional ethnography in multi-level environmental governance settings. Contributions to REDD+ governance scholarship from a major West African forest nation perspective address a significant gap in the global literature. Keywords: REDD+, carbon governance, forest sovereignty, Nigeria, political ecology.