Political Ecology of Environmental Management in Nigeria’s Oil-Producing States: Power, Knowledge, and Environmental Justice

This dissertation develops a political ecology analysis of environmental management in Nigeria's oil-producing states, examining how the distribution of power, the production and contestation of environmental knowledge, and the dynamics of environmental justice shape the practice and outcomes of environmental management in the Niger Delta. Political ecology provides a theoretical framework that connects ecological conditions with political and economic power relations, and its application to environmental management, rather than purely to environmental conflict and degradation, constitutes a theoretical contribution that extends the field's analytical reach. The dissertation integrates ethnographic fieldwork conducted over eighteen months across five communities in Bayelsa and Rivers States with documentary analysis of regulatory records, oil company environmental reports, and community environmental monitoring data, and discourse analysis of environmental management policy texts. Original theoretical contributions include a typology of environmental knowledge legitimacy claims in the Niger Delta context that distinguishes state regulatory knowledge, corporate expert knowledge, community indigenous knowledge, and NGO advocacy knowledge, and theorises the political processes through which particular knowledge types gain or lose authority in environmental management decisions. The dissertation also develops an original Environmental Justice Deficit Index for the Niger Delta, constructed from exposure, recognition, and participation dimensions of environmental justice, and applies it to map the spatial distribution of environmental management injustice across the delta's communities. Original policy implications are derived from the political ecology analysis, including specific institutional design recommendations for restructuring environmental management governance in the oil-producing states to address identified power imbalances. Keywords: political ecology, environmental management, Niger Delta, environmental justice, knowledge politics.