A Dynamic Programming Framework for Adaptive Natural Resource Governance Under Climate Uncertainty in the Niger Delta

Natural resource governance in the Niger Delta faces compounding pressures from oil extraction legacies, climate-change-driven hydrological shifts, escalating community livelihood demands, and weakening institutional oversight, creating a dynamic multi-stakeholder governance problem that exceeds the analytical capacity of existing static optimization frameworks. This dissertation develops a dynamic programming framework for adaptive natural resource governance under climate uncertainty in the Niger Delta, incorporating multiple resource types, stakeholder heterogeneity, and structural uncertainty about ecosystem response to extraction and climate stressors. Foundational contributions to dynamic programming theory under structural uncertainty are made by extending the Markov decision process formulation to a robust Markov decision process with ambiguous transition probability sets informed by climate model ensemble disagreement. A multi-resource extraction model coupling fisheries, freshwater, and forest resources is formulated within the robust dynamic programming framework, with inter-resource dependencies captured through coupled state transition equations calibrated from ecological survey data collected across three Niger Delta states. Original solution algorithms exploiting the problem's nested structure are developed and proven to converge to the robust optimal policy. Empirical application generates governance policy recommendations expressed as adaptive extraction quota rules conditioned on observable ecosystem state indicators. The framework demonstrates that adaptive policies contingent on ecosystem state outperform static quota systems by 28 percent in expected multi-period resource value across climate scenarios. This dissertation makes original contributions to dynamic programming theory, natural resource governance modelling, and environmental operations research in the context of ecologically stressed Nigerian resource systems. Keywords: dynamic programming, natural resource governance, climate uncertainty, Niger Delta, Markov decision process