Foreign Aid, Trade Conditionality, and Nigeria’s Policy Space for Industrial Development: A Critical Political Economy Analysis

This dissertation conducts a critical political economy analysis of the relationship between foreign aid flows, trade conditionality requirements, and Nigeria's policy space for pursuing autonomous industrial development strategies, examining the extent to which donor-recipient power asymmetries constrain the government's capacity to deploy heterodox industrial policies. The Washington Consensus framework and its successors, embedded in World Bank and IMF programme conditionalities, have significantly shaped Nigerian trade and industrial policy from the structural adjustment era to the present, generating an ongoing debate about the compatibility of international financial institution requirements with developmental state approaches to industrialisation. The study employs a historical institutionalist methodology combining documentary analysis of IMF Article IV consultations, World Bank programme documents, and bilateral aid agreements from 1986 to 2024 with process tracing of three major industrial policy episodes: the trade liberalisation of the late 1980s, the Obasanjo-era privatisation and trade reforms, and the 2016-2023 diversification agenda. Data are supplemented by 35 elite interviews with former finance ministers, World Bank Nigeria country directors, trade negotiators, and independent development economists. The theoretical framework integrates the policy space literature, dependency theory's contemporary reformulations, and the international political economy of development finance. The dissertation develops an original policy space measurement framework for Nigerian industrial policy, incorporating dimensions of fiscal, monetary, trade, and regulatory autonomy. Original contributions include the policy space measurement framework, a causal typology of conditionality-policy interaction modes, and a political economy model of developing country industrial policy autonomy under aid dependency. Keywords: foreign aid, trade conditionality, industrial policy, political economy, Nigeria