The European Union’s International Climate Governance Leadership and Nigeria’s Climate Policy Responses: An Original Institutional Analysis

This doctoral study develops an original institutional analysis of the European Union's international climate governance leadership and its effects on Nigeria's domestic climate policy development, testing whether EU climate leadership produces convergence, contestation, or strategic adaptation in Nigerian climate governance between 2015 and 2024. The EU has positioned itself as the world's most ambitious climate governance leader, and the pathways through which this leadership influences climate policy in major African emitters like Nigeria are theoretically significant and empirically under-examined. Drawing on Falkner's EU climate leadership theory, historical institutionalism, and the Institutional Convergence Framework, this study develops an original Differentiated Climate Influence Model (DCIM) that specifies distinct influence pathways: normative diffusion through UNFCCC negotiations, financial leverage through climate finance conditionality, market channel through the CBAM mechanism, and technical cooperation through bilateral STI programmes. Empirical analysis draws on 10 years of Nigerian climate policy documents (NDCs, climate finance strategy, sectoral decarbonisation plans), EU-Nigeria climate diplomacy records, and a comprehensive dataset of EU climate cooperation transactions in Nigeria. Elite interviews with 45 participants including Nigerian climate negotiators, EU climate diplomats, Nigerian energy sector regulators, and climate finance managers provide explanatory evidence for each DCIM pathway. Original contributions include the DCIM theoretical model, the primary data corpus, and the most empirically grounded analysis of EU climate leadership influence on Nigeria available in the scholarly literature. Keywords: EU climate governance leadership, Nigeria climate policy, DCIM, climate finance, institutional analysis.