Power, Knowledge, and Policy Discourse in Nigeria’s Anti-Poverty Programmes: A Foucauldian Critical Policy Analysis

This study applies Foucauldian critical discourse analysis to examine how power-knowledge dynamics construct and sustain dominant policy discourses around poverty and anti-poverty programmes in Nigeria, generating original theoretical contributions to critical policy studies. Mainstream poverty policy discourse in Nigeria, shaped by international financial institutions, bilateral donors, and federal technocratic elites, produces specific representations of the poor, of poverty causation, and of appropriate policy interventions that marginalise alternative understandings rooted in structural inequality and political economy critique. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse theory, critical policy studies, and recent poverty governance literature from 2019 to 2024, the study employs a critical discourse research design. A corpus of 240 policy texts spanning federal poverty strategy documents, World Bank country poverty assessments, DFID programme evaluations, and civil society poverty reports from 1999 to 2023 is subjected to genealogical and discourse analysis. Sixty interviews with policy architects, poverty programme managers, academic poverty researchers, and community-based poverty advocates enrich the discursive analysis with positional perspectives. The study's theoretical contribution is the Poverty Discourse Power-Circuit Framework, which maps four discourse circuits, technocratic, donor, civic, and subaltern, and theorises how their differential power relationships shape which poverty narratives achieve policy traction and which are systematically silenced. This framework advances Foucauldian policy analysis by operationalising multi-circuit discourse power in development policy contexts. Findings generate insights for critical policy studies, development discourse scholarship, and poverty governance reform advocacy in Nigeria. Keywords: Foucauldian analysis, poverty discourse, critical policy studies, anti-poverty programmes, Nigeria