Oil Resource Governance, Institutional Quality, and Intergenerational Equity in Nigeria: An Original Theoretical and Empirical Contribution

This study develops an original theoretical and empirical contribution to the literature on oil resource governance, institutional quality, and intergenerational equity in Nigeria. Nigeria's oil wealth has been extracted over six decades with limited long-run sovereign wealth accumulation, significant environmental liability, and widening intergenerational inequality, yet a unified theoretical framework integrating these dimensions does not exist in the literature. Drawing on resource governance theory, intergenerational justice philosophy, institutional economics, and recent sovereign wealth fund literature from 2019 to 2024, the study employs a theory-building mixed-methods research design. Original theoretical work is supported by a quantitative analysis using a novel composite Intergenerational Resource Equity Index constructed from environmental liability estimates, sovereign wealth reserves, oil revenue transparency scores, and intergenerational human development trends. Panel regression and counterfactual scenario modelling techniques are applied using data from 1980 to 2023. The theoretical contribution of the study is a Resource-Institutional-Equity framework that models the conditional pathways through which institutional quality mediates resource governance outcomes for intergenerational equity. This framework extends existing resource curse theory by incorporating intergenerational justice dimensions absent from current models. Empirical findings are expected to show that Nigeria's institutional capacity to translate resource revenues into intergenerational equity has declined rather than improved despite governance reforms since 2003. Recommendations address constitutional oil savings rules, independent sovereign wealth fund governance, and ecological debt accounting. Keywords: oil governance, institutional quality, intergenerational equity, Nigeria, resource curse