Institutional Entrepreneurship and Regulatory Reform: How Entrepreneurs Shape the Institutional Environment in Nigeria’s Financial Technology Sector

This dissertation examines institutional entrepreneurship in Nigeria's financial technology sector, investigating how fintech entrepreneurs actively shape the regulatory and institutional environment rather than merely responding to it, and developing an original theory of reciprocal institutional co-evolution between entrepreneurs and regulatory institutions. Institutional theory has predominantly treated institutions as constraints on entrepreneurial behaviour, but a growing body of institutional entrepreneurship research shows that powerful actors can reshape institutional fields. The Nigerian fintech sector, where entrepreneurs have engaged in sustained lobbying, coalition building, and regulatory sandbox participation that has produced significant changes in the CBN's digital finance regulatory framework, offers an exceptional empirical case for studying this dynamic. The dissertation employs a longitudinal qualitative research design using a combination of process tracing and discourse analysis, tracking the co-evolution of fintech entrepreneurial strategies and CBN regulatory positions over the period from 2012 to 2023. Data were collected through 40 in-depth interviews with fintech founders, industry association leaders, and CBN regulatory officials, supplemented by documentary analysis of regulatory communications, industry submissions, and Parliamentary testimony. The original theoretical contribution is a model of Reciprocal Regulatory Co-evolution that distinguishes three phases of institutional entrepreneur-regulator interaction: initial regulatory arbitrage in an institutional void, collaborative norm-setting through sandbox mechanisms, and adversarial consolidation as market power dynamics shift. The model extends institutional entrepreneurship theory to account for ongoing rather than episodic institutional change. Keywords: institutional entrepreneurship, regulatory co-evolution, fintech, CBN, Nigeria.