Theorizing Local Government Failure in Nigeria: A New Institutional Economics Framework for Understanding Governance Collapse at the Sub-National Level

This study develops an original theoretical framework grounded in New Institutional Economics to explain the systemic failure of local government institutions in Nigeria. Existing theories of local governance failure, drawn predominantly from Western democratic contexts, inadequately account for the complex interaction of formal constitutional rules, informal patrimonial norms, principal-agent distortions, and historical path dependencies that characterize the Nigerian local government system. This dissertation employs a comparative historical analysis across six purposively selected states representing each geopolitical zone, covering the period from the 1976 Local Government Reform to the present. Primary data is gathered through 50 elite interviews with former local government chairmen, constitutional law scholars, state government officials, and governance academics, supplemented by archival document analysis. Secondary data includes colonial governance records, constitutional conference proceedings, and comparative governance literature from Sub-Saharan Africa. The theoretical framework developed introduces the concept of Institutionalized Capture, describing how both state-level political actors and community elite networks systematically colonize local government institutions, making developmental governance structurally improbable under current conditions. The study makes an original contribution by producing a testable, Nigeria-specific theory of local government institutional failure that challenges universalist good governance prescriptions. Findings are expected to reframe the local government reform debate from administrative capacity interventions toward deep institutional restructuring, including formal protection of local government constitutional autonomy, community oversight constitutionalization, and independent judicial enforcement of local government financial rights. Keywords: Local government failure, New Institutional Economics, institutional capture, Nigeria, theoretical framework.