Entrepreneurship, Climate Change Adaptation, and Sustainability Transitions in Nigeria’s Agricultural Sector: A Sociotechnical Analysis

This dissertation develops an original sociotechnical analysis of climate entrepreneurship and sustainability transitions in Nigeria's agricultural sector, examining how entrepreneurs are developing and diffusing climate-adaptive innovations that have the potential to transform the practices and institutions of Nigerian agriculture in response to accelerating climate change impacts. Nigeria's agricultural sector, which employs over 70 percent of the country's rural labour force, faces severe and growing climate change pressures including erratic rainfall, increased flooding, and desertification, and the transition to more resilient and sustainable agricultural practices requires entrepreneurial innovation at multiple system levels simultaneously. The dissertation applies multi-level perspective theory from sustainability transitions research, extended through an original integration with entrepreneurship theory, to analyse the dynamics of climate entrepreneurship across three agricultural system contexts: smallholder crop farming in the North Central zone under increased drought stress, coastal aquaculture in the Niger Delta under saltwater intrusion pressure, and pastoralist herding communities in the North West adapting to grassland degradation. Longitudinal qualitative fieldwork over 24 months, combining ethnographic observation, 70 interviews with climate entrepreneurs and agricultural system actors, and policy document analysis, provides the empirical foundation. The original theoretical contribution is a Climate Entrepreneurship Transition Framework that distinguishes three roles for entrepreneurs in sustainability transitions, niche innovators who develop and test novel climate adaptations, intermediaries who broker regime-level adoption, and system architects who design new institutional arrangements, and specifies the conditions under which entrepreneurs can catalyse transitions rather than merely generating isolated innovations. Keywords: climate entrepreneurship, sustainability transitions, agriculture, multi-level perspective, Nigeria.