Power, Knowledge, and the Production of Development Policy in Nigeria: A Post-Structuralist Analysis

This study applies a post-structuralist analytical framework to the production of development policy in Nigeria, investigating how international development organisations, the Nigerian state, and domestic elite actors collectively constitute the knowledge regimes through which development problems are defined, solutions are prescribed, and alternative possibilities are foreclosed. Post-structuralist political economy offers a distinctive theoretical lens for development policy analysis that has been productively applied in Global South development contexts but has been underutilised in Nigerian political science research. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis, the post-development theory tradition, and the critical international political economy literature, the study develops an original methodology for tracing how development knowledge is produced, institutionalised, and enforced in the Nigerian policy context. The methodology is applied through systematic discourse analysis of development policy documents produced by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, United Nations Development Programme, and Nigerian government over the period 2010 to 2023, supplemented by 48 interviews with development technocrats, civil society development analysts, and community development practitioners across the six geopolitical zones. Findings reveal that Nigerian development policy is produced through a constrained discursive field dominated by international financial institution epistemologies that systematically marginalise indigenous knowledge traditions, community-led development models, and redistributive policy alternatives. The neoliberal development consensus has been internalised by significant segments of Nigerian technocratic elites, reproducing the epistemic conditions of its own perpetuation even in the absence of direct conditionality pressure. The study makes an original theoretical contribution to African development studies by demonstrating the applicability and empirical productivity of post-structuralist frameworks in Nigerian policy research. Keywords: post-structuralism, development policy, knowledge production, Nigeria, power-knowledge