Contested Sovereignty and International Environmental Governance: Nigeria, Royal Dutch Shell, and the Politics of Environmental Accountability

This dissertation examines the contestation over sovereignty and accountability in the context of environmental damage caused by Royal Dutch Shell's operations in the Niger Delta, developing an original theoretical account of how international legal proceedings, transnational advocacy, and corporate diplomatic strategies interact to challenge and reshape traditional sovereignty-based frameworks for environmental governance. The litigation and advocacy surrounding Shell's operations in the Niger Delta, including the landmark Dutch court ruling in 2021 finding Shell's Nigerian subsidiary liable for pipeline pollution, represents a frontier case in the emerging field of transnational environmental accountability. Drawing on critical sovereignty theory, transnational legal process theory, and environmental governance studies, this study traces the evolution of the Niger Delta accountability campaign from the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 through the 2021 Dutch Supreme Court ruling and subsequent developments to 2024. Primary data are drawn from court documentation from Dutch, English, and Nigerian proceedings, Amnesty International investigation reports, Shell corporate filings, and semi-structured interviews with Ogoni activists, human rights lawyers, and Nigerian government officials. The dissertation's theoretical contribution lies in articulating the concept of extraterritorial environmental sovereignty to describe the conditions under which transnational legal processes successfully pierce traditional sovereignty shields to impose environmental accountability on multinational corporations and their home states. Keywords: sovereignty, environmental accountability, Niger Delta, Shell, transnational law.