Multi-Scale Environmental Management Governance and Biodiversity Conservation Outcomes in Nigerian Forest Landscapes

This dissertation investigates the relationships between multi-scale environmental management governance arrangements and biodiversity conservation outcomes in Nigerian forest landscapes, developing an original analytical framework for assessing governance fit across local, state, national, and international scales and testing its predictive power against biodiversity outcome data. Biodiversity conservation in Nigerian forest landscapes involves governance actors and interventions operating at multiple scales simultaneously, including village forest management committees, state forestry commissions, national park services, federal environmental agencies, and international conservation organisations, and the interactions between these governance levels determine conservation effectiveness in ways that single-scale analyses cannot capture. The original theoretical contribution is a Multi-Scale Governance Fit Framework for Forest Conservation that formalises the concept of governance fit across four dimensions: vertical coherence between governance actors at different scales, horizontal coordination between agencies at the same scale, temporal alignment between governance decision cycles and ecological process timescales, and functional match between governance instruments and the specific threats driving biodiversity loss at each landscape. The framework is operationalised through a comparative study of five forest landscape governance systems in South West, South East, South South, and North Central Nigeria, combining ecological field surveys to quantify biodiversity outcomes, governance quality assessment using the framework dimensions, and institutional analysis of governance arrangements at each scale. Structural equation modelling tests the hypothesised relationships between governance fit dimensions and biodiversity outcomes. Original contributions include the framework, the empirical governance quality dataset, and the structural equation model results. Keywords: multi-scale governance, biodiversity conservation, forest landscape, Nigeria, governance fit.