The Bureaucratic Politics of Federal Policy Coordination in Nigeria: Ministries, Departments, and Agencies

This dissertation provides an original theoretical and empirical analysis of bureaucratic politics in federal policy coordination among Nigeria's ministries, departments, and agencies (MDAs), addressing a fundamental gap in the literature on Nigerian public administration. Policy coordination failures among MDAs have been widely cited as primary drivers of poor policy outcomes in areas including health, education, and infrastructure, yet no comprehensive theory of bureaucratic politics tailored to Nigeria's distinctive federal MDA system has been developed. The dissertation employs a mixed-methods design incorporating elite interview analysis (85 interviews with ministers, permanent secretaries, directors-general, and senior technical staff across 18 federal MDAs) and computational content analysis of 2,400 inter-ministerial correspondence documents from 2018 to 2023, combined with a structured survey of 350 senior federal civil servants. Bureaucratic Politics Theory by Allison and Halperin and the Whole-of-Government Approach provide the theoretical anchors. The dissertation proposes an original Nigerian MDA Coordination Failure Model (NMCFM) that identifies four endogenous coordination pathologies: mandate ambiguity exploitation, resource territory defence, information asymmetry manipulation, and political patronage network prioritisation. Quantitative analysis using network analysis and regression confirms the NMCFM's predictive validity. The dissertation contributes an empirically grounded, Nigeria-specific extension of bureaucratic politics theory and proposes structural reforms to the National Council on Privatisation and key inter-ministerial coordination institutions. Keywords: bureaucratic politics, policy coordination, Nigerian MDAs, federal administration, whole-of-government.