Beyond Ecological Deficits: Unveiling Institutional Pathologies Driving Food Insecurity in Contemporary Nigeria
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The normative mandate for food security in Nigeria faces systemic collapse, driven not by ecological deficits but by severe institutional pathologies and regulatory dysfunction. This study investigated the mechanisms of agricultural policy failure amidst extensive macroeconomic interventions. Utilizing process tracing and comparative policy analysis against agrarian transitions in Brazil and Vietnam, the research analyzed implementation data through qualitative thematic coding. Findings demonstrate that state interventions continuously suffer from elite capture within credit programs and mimetic isomorphism, creating structural decoupling between elite frameworks and local capacities. Furthermore, monopolistic land tenure regulations perpetuate tenurial insecurities and communal conflicts, inherently distorting agrarian productivity. Consequently, state capital injections cannot correct systemic vulnerabilities without transiting fundamentally from extractive rentier networks toward highly inclusive institutions. Offering an innovative food systems compact, this research proposes protected structural financing, decentralized tenure legalization, and polycentric governance, advancing institutionalism theory by directly linking tenurial security with global agrarian policy resilience.
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