CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY INFORMATION DISCLOSURE AND MARINE ECOSYSTEM PROTECTION: THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

Nigeria possesses one of the largest coastlines in West Africa and hosts Africa's most extensive mangrove forest system in the Niger Delta, waters that sustain tens of millions of livelihoods through fishing, shipping, and tourism and that underpin the country's ambition to diversify beyond an oil-dependent economy. This paper synthesises a broader qualitative content-analysis study of marine ecosystem protection in Nigeria between 2020 and 2026, drawing on peer-reviewed research, statutes, government and institutional reports, court rulings, and credible news coverage. It reviews six principal threats to Nigeria's coast and ocean,  oil pollution and mangrove loss in the Niger Delta, gas flaring, illegal and unregulated foreign fishing in the Gulf of Guinea, plastic and urban waste pollution around Lagos, coastal erosion and sea-level rise, and the compounding effects of climate change and invasive species, and examines the legal and institutional architecture built to govern them, including the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency, the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, and the Petroleum Industry Act of 2021. It then interrogates Nigeria's policy response, including the newly created Ministry of Marine and Blue Economy, the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, and Nigeria's participation in the 2023 High Seas Treaty. To explain why a formally strong governance framework produces weak outcomes, the paper develops an Integrated Marine Ecosystem Governance (IMEG) model that combines the Driver–Pressure–State–Impact–Response (DPSIR) framework, common-pool resource theory, and a political ecology perspective. The analysis finds that Nigeria has built genuine institutions and made genuine commitments, yet chronic funding gaps, fragmented and overlapping mandates, weak monitoring and sanctioning, and an uneven distribution of power and cost between polluting industries and coastal communities sustain a wide and persistent gap between written policy and results on the water. The paper closes with a reform agenda mapped onto the three sites of the IMEG model, the causal chain, the governance layer, and the political ecology base, and argues that Nigeria's blue economy ambitions will remain aspirational unless reform proceeds on all three sites at once.