Policies, Laws and Regulations

This political economy analysis asks why Nigeria’s ambitious green-jobs agenda has not yet translated into employment at scale, and what it would take politically to change that. It looks past the technical case for the transition to the incentives, institutions and power relations that actually govern whether policy is designed, funded and delivered. Its central finding is that the binding constraints are political and institutional rather than technical: a hydrocarbon-based political economy that rewards the protection of oil rents, an institutional landscape crowded with overlapping mandates and weak coordination, and a set of governance risks, from rent-seeking in procurement to the short horizons of the electoral cycle, that quietly shape which programmes get built and who benefits.

Nigeria faces acute climate vulnerabilities while grappling with high youth unemployment and the urgent need to diversify an oil-dependent economy. This synthesis draws on key informant interviews with stakeholders across government, civil society, the private sector and the informal economy, alongside a review of national policy and the research literature. Respondents recognised Nigeria’s policy frameworks, including the Nationally Determined Contributions and the net-zero pledge for 2060, but pointed consistently to a gap between policy intent and grassroots reality.

This study asks whether Nigeria’s low-carbon transition can be made to create green jobs, and finds that the obstacle is not ambition but integration. The country has assembled a comparatively strong architecture of energy and climate policy, yet energy, labour and education policy are not aligned, labour considerations sit at the margin of energy planning, and the institutions meant to coordinate the whole remain weak where it matters most. The transition is constrained less by what is on paper than by the machinery to deliver it.