Energy justice in policy: assessing renewable energy and energy transition frameworks in Nigeria

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a structured coding schema for evaluating energy justice in policy documents, applicable to comparative studies.

🏢実務担当者:Offers a checklist for ensuring justice provisions are explicit and enforceable in corporate or national transition plans.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need to strengthen reparative and recognitional justice mechanisms in energy transition policies.

Abstract Renewable energy is central to climate strategies in Nigeria, yet the policy architecture guiding this transition continues to prioritise technical and economic metrics while giving limited attention to social and ecological safeguards. This paper conducts a structured qualitative content analysis of eight national renewable energy and energy transition policy documents to evaluate the extent to which energy justice principles are embedded in Nigeria’s transition framework. Using a theory-driven coding schema spanning procedural, recognitional, distributional, and reparative justice, each document was assessed across eighteen parameters using a five-point explicitness-enforceability scale distinguishing between provisions that are explicit and enforceable, explicit but non-enforceable, general but enforceable, general and non-enforceable, and not addressed. Findings show that justice considerations are widely referenced but unevenly operationalised across the instrument set. When scores are normalised against the maximum available within each dimension, procedural justice achieves the highest proportional integration at 53.4% of its possible maximum, followed by distributional justice at 50.5%, recognitional justice at 34.4%, and reparative justice at 26.0%. This rank order holds independently of differential parameter weighting and indicates that access-oriented and process-focused provisions are more consistently embedded than those addressing identity, historical harm, and compensatory obligation. Enforcement mechanisms, community feedback and grievance pathways, cultural safeguards, and compensation frameworks for historically affected communities are the most consistently absent or under-specified provisions across the corpus. The findings demonstrate that the barrier to stronger justice integration is not the absence of legal authority within Nigeria’s existing statutory architecture but the selective application of that authority to community-facing and reparative provisions. The paper provides a replicable analytical framework applicable to comparable fossil fuel-dependent, climate-vulnerable transition contexts beyond Nigeria.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1088/2753-3751/ae87a6first seen 2026-07-31 05:05:10