International Relations and the Politics of Climate Change in Africa2: A Study of the Nigeria’s Just Transition Strategy for Mitigation
This article examines Nigeria’s climate change mitigation strategy through the lens of international relations theory, analysing how Africa’s most populous nation navigates the intersection of domestic energy imperatives, economic development constraints, and global climate obligations. Existing scholarship has treated these pressures largely in isolation, applying realist, liberal institutionalist, or constructivist concepts singly and briefly rather than as an integrated explanatory architecture. Drawing on all three traditions in a single analytical framework, the study evaluates Nigeria’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the 2022 Energy Transition Plan (ETP), the Climate Change Act 2021, and the country’s bilateral and multilateral climate diplomacy. The analysis identifies three overarching tensions structuring Nigeria’s climate politics: fossil fuel economic dependence versus decarbonisation commitments; a financing gap of roughly two orders of magnitude between pledged and available climate resources; and the divergence between normative climate obligations accepted in international forums and the domestic political economy realities that constrain their implementation. Findings show that Nigeria’s conditional NDC architecture and natural gas advocacy exemplify realist bargaining logic; that liberal institutionalist finance and partnership mechanisms, while diplomatically active, remain structurally inadequate relative to the roughly 400 billion United States dollar Energy Transition Plan requirement; and that constructivist norm diffusion has produced genuine legislative innovation without displacing entrenched developmental priorities. The article further identifies specific interaction effects among the three theoretical logics for example, a liberal-realist tension embedded within the financing gap itself that single-paradigm analyses cannot capture. The study contributes to debates on just transition, climate governance in resource-dependent developing economies, and the structural inequities of global climate finance architecture, and closes with differentiated recommendations for the international community and for Nigerian policymakers.
Keywords: Africa; climate finance; energy transition; international relations; Nigeria
