Theoretical and Empirical Contributions to Understanding Environmental Management Behaviour of Small and Medium Enterprises in Nigeria

This dissertation makes original theoretical and empirical contributions to the understanding of environmental management behaviour among small and medium enterprises in Nigeria, developing a novel theoretical framework that explains why Nigerian SMEs adopt or resist environmental management practices and testing this framework empirically across four industrial sectors and three geopolitical zones. SMEs constitute the vast majority of Nigeria's formal and informal enterprise population, are collectively responsible for significant environmental impacts, and are the weakest link in Nigeria's environmental governance chain, yet the academic literature provides no theoretically grounded account of what drives or inhibits their environmental management behaviour in the Nigerian context. The theoretical contribution is an original SME Environmental Management Behaviour Framework that integrates institutional theory, the theory of planned behaviour, stakeholder theory, and transaction cost economics into a unified explanatory model that accounts for the specific institutional, social, and economic conditions facing Nigerian SMEs. The framework specifies the relative contribution of formal regulatory pressure, informal community and market pressure, owner-manager values and capabilities, and environmental management cost-benefit calculations to adoption or non-adoption decisions, with explicit modelling of how these determinants vary by firm size, sector, location, and ownership structure. The framework is tested using a multi-sector survey of 420 SME owner-managers in Lagos, Kano, and Port Harcourt, covering manufacturing, food processing, construction, and services sectors. Structural equation modelling is applied to test the hypothesised relationships. The empirical results generate sector and location-specific predictions about which policy instruments are most likely to change SME environmental management behaviour in Nigerian conditions. Keywords: SME environmental management, behaviour theory, Nigeria, institutional theory, regulatory compliance.