Theorising Environmental Justice in Nigerian Oil-Producing Communities: An Original Framework for Legal Accountability

Environmental justice theory as developed in North American and European scholarship inadequately captures the political economy of oil extraction, communal land rights, and regulatory failure that defines the environmental justice problematic in Nigeria's Niger Delta region. A theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded framework for environmental justice specific to the Nigerian oil-producing community context is absent from the comparative public law literature. This study develops an original theoretical framework for environmental justice in Nigerian oil-producing communities, integrating elements of Political Ecology, the Capabilities Approach, Critical Legal Theory, and African communal rights philosophy to produce a Contextualised Nigerian Environmental Justice Model. The theoretical framework is built through a two-phase methodology: a systematic review of 200 published judgments from Nigerian courts and the ECOWAS Community Court of Justice involving oil-producing community environmental claims from 2000 to 2023, and in-depth qualitative interviews with 40 community legal advocates, academics, and affected community representatives from Bayelsa, Delta, and Rivers States. The study uses Constructivist Grounded Theory to inductively derive framework dimensions from empirical community experience. The original contribution is a replicable Environmental Justice Accountability Model for resource-extractive communities in African federal systems, filling a significant gap in comparative public law theory. Findings advance the theoretical basis for legislative reform of the Petroleum Industry Act's community development provisions. Keywords: environmental justice, oil communities, Niger Delta, legal accountability, political ecology.