POLITICAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BARRIERS TO EFFECTIVE CLIMATE GOVERNANCE IN NIGERIA
Keywords:
Climate governance, Nigeria, environmental politics, climate change, institutional capacity, sustainability, climate diplomacyAbstract
Nigeria’s efforts to tackle climate change face significant political, institutional, and economic problem. Although Nigeria has employed several climate policies and global commitments, the essence of its climate governance framework is limited by weak institutional capacity, policy enforcement gaps, limited fund, and continued dependence on fossil fuel revenues. Climate governance has become a major contemporary issue within modern global environmental politics owing to the increasing threat caused by climate change to human security, sustainable development, and ecological growth. Nigeria is the largest economy and one of the continent’s major player oil-producing states, fraught with severe environmental challenges which include flooding, desertification, coastal erosion, deforestation, and energy insecurity. Despite various global commitments and local policy mechanism targeted to mitigating and adapting to climate change, the reality of climate governance in Nigeria remains limited by political and institutional challenges. This work underscored the political and institutional obstacles limiting climate governance in Nigeria. Based on qualitative analysis and Global Governance Theory and Dependency Theory Perspectives, the paper contends that climate governance reliability is fundamentally inhibited by weak institutions, policy inconsistency, corruption, inadequate climate financing, bureaucratic segmentation/fragmentation, and political and economic dependence on fossil fuel income. The study further highlights Nigeria’s climate diplomacy in the context of international environmental regimes such as the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The paper concludes that upholding institutional capacity, increasing transparency, improving policy coordination and diversifying the economy beyond fossil fuel dependence are integral for sustainable climate governance in Nigeria.References
Abah, J. (2025). Climate justice in Nigeria: The role of the National Climate Change Act in addressing inequities in climate action. International Review of Law and Jurisprudence.
Abubakar, A. H. (2025). Unlocking the potentials of climate finance mechanisms in Nigeria. African Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences.
Abu, U. J. (2025, October 6). Unlocking climate finance: A lifeline for Nigeria’s states, businesses. The Eagle Online.
Adelekan, I. O. (2010). Vulnerability of poor urban coastal communities to climate change in Lagos, Nigeria. Environment and Urbanization, 22(2), 433–450.
Agom, U. C. (2025). Environmental law and climate governance as catalysts for sustainable development in Nigeria: Bridging global norms and local realities. ISA Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 2(4), 47–53.
Akinkuolie, T. A., Ogunbode, T. O., & Adekiya, A. O. (2025). Resilience to climate-induced food insecurity in Nigeria. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 9.
Ake, C. (1981). A political economy of Africa. Longman.
Ayanlade, A., & Jegede, M. O. (2016). Climate change and climate variability in Nigeria. Climate, 4(3), 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/cli4030036
Bodansky, D. (2016). The Paris Climate Change Agreement: A new hope? American Journal of International Law, 110(2), 288–319.
Bulkeley, H., & Newell, P. (2015). Governing climate change. Routledge.
Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. (1979). Dependency and development in Latin America. University of California Press.
Ciplet, D., Roberts, J. T., & Khan, M. R. (2015). Power in a warming world: The new global politics of climate change and the remaking of environmental inequality. MIT Press.
Czempiel, E.-O. (1992). Governance and democratization. In J. N. Rosenau & E.-O. Czempiel (Eds.), Governance without government: Order and change in world politics (pp. 250–271). Cambridge University Press.
Falkner, R. (2016). The Paris Agreement and the new logic of international climate politics. International Affairs, 92(5), 1107–1125.
Federal Ministry of Environment. (2021). National Climate Change Policy Response and Strategy. Government of Nigeria.
Federal Republic of Nigeria. (2021). Climate Change Act 2021. Government Printer.
Frank, A. G. (1967). Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America. Monthly Review Press.
Green Climate Fund. (2024, March 29). Strengthening Nigeria’s capacity to engage in climate action for a low-emissions and climate resilient development pathway (Readiness proposal).
Held, D., & McGrew, A. (2002). Governing globalization: Power, authority and global governance. Polity Press.
Ibrahim, E. S., Ahmed, B., Arodudu, O. T., et al. (2022). Desertification in the Sahel Region: A case of desert encroachment monitoring in North-Eastern Nigeria. Geographies, 2(2), 204–226.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (2022). Climate change 2022: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. IPCC.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (2023). Climate change 2023: Synthesis report. IPCC.
Keohane, R. O., & Victor, D. G. (2011). The regime complex for climate change. Perspectives on Politics, 9(1), 7–23.
Mashood, A. A., & Usman, S. B. (2025). Governance and legal innovation for environmental sustainability: Implementing Nigeria’s Climate Change Act. Proceedings of the International Conference for Institute of Administration, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
Najam, A. (2005). Developing countries and global environmental governance. International Environmental Agreements, 5(3), 303–321.
National Bureau of Statistics, NEMA, & UNDP. (2023). Nigeria flood impact, recovery and mitigation assessment report 2022–2023. Abuja.
National Council on Climate Change. (2022). Nigeria’s climate governance framework. NCCC.
Niang, I., Ruppel, O. C., Abdrabo, M. A., et al. (2014). Africa. In Climate change 2014: Impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability.
Okafor, C. C., Madu, C. N., Nwoye, A. V., et al. (2025). Research on climate change initiatives in Nigeria: Identifying trends, themes and future directions. Sustainability, 17(9), 3995.
Okereke, C., & Coventry, P. (2016). Climate justice and the international regime. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 7(6), 834–851. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.431
Omoju, O. E. (2025). Domestic implications of oil and gas demand reduction strategies for Nigeria. Climate Strategies.
Ostrom, E. (2010). Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change. Global Environmental Change, 20(4), 550–557. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2010.07.004
Rosenau, J. N. (1999). Toward an ontology for global governance. In M. Hewson & T. J. Sinclair (Eds.), Approaches to global governance theory (pp. 287–302). SUNY Press.
Sala-i-Martin, X., & Subramanian, A. (2013). Addressing the resource curse: An illustration from Nigeria. Journal of African Economies, 22(4), 570–615. https://doi.org/xxxxx
Transparency International. (2024). Corruption perceptions index 2024. Transparency International.
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). (2022). Adaptation gap report 2022. UNEP.
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). (2023). Adaptation gap report 2023. UNEP.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (2015). Paris Agreement. UNFCCC.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (2025). Nigeria’s updated NDC 3.0. UNFCCC Secretariat.
World Bank. (2021). Climate risk country profile: Nigeria. World Bank.
World Bank. (2022). Nigeria climate change knowledge portal. World Bank.
World Bank. (2024). Nigeria climate finance assessment report. World Bank.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, adaptation, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors are permitted to post their work online in institutional/disciplinary repositories or on their own websites. Pre-print versions posted online should include a citation and link to the final published version in Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication as soon as the issue is available; post-print versions (including the final publisher's PDF) should include a citation and link to the journal's website.
