Climate Change, Environmental Administration, and Adaptive Governance in the Lake Chad Basin States

This dissertation provides an original analysis of climate change adaptive governance frameworks and environmental administration responses in Nigeria's Lake Chad Basin states, encompassing Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa in the North East geopolitical zone. The Lake Chad Basin is experiencing one of the world's most acute climate-driven environmental crises, with the lake's surface area having shrunk by over 90 percent since the 1960s, driving resource conflict, displacement, and livelihood collapse. This dissertation examines how public administrative frameworks have responded to the adaptive governance demands imposed by this crisis. The dissertation employs a sequential multi-method design: a systematic review of 95 climate governance studies in African dryland contexts; a 24-month longitudinal qualitative study involving 70 interviews with state environmental administrators, local government officials, Lake Chad Basin Commission representatives, affected community leaders, and international environmental governance experts; and quantitative analysis of environmental expenditure and governance outcome data from 2015 to 2023. Adaptive Governance Theory by Folke and colleagues, the Social-Ecological Systems (SES) Framework by Ostrom, and the Polycentric Governance Theory provide the theoretical foundation. The dissertation proposes the Climate-Adaptive Administration Framework (CAAF), which identifies institutional flexibility, multi-scale coordination, community co-governance, and anticipatory policymaking as the four pillars of climate-adaptive administration in dryland governance contexts. Nigeria's current administrative frameworks are found to score critically low on all four pillars, contributing to maladaptive responses that amplify rather than reduce community vulnerability. Keywords: climate change, adaptive governance, Lake Chad Basin, environmental administration, North East Nigeria.