Learn, Unlearn and Relearn into a Sustainable Future: Sustainability Consciousness in Nigeria
After years of speedy urbanization, population growth, and industrialization, Nigeria is now home to some of the world's environmental and natural resource problems (Dwivedi and Vajpeyi, 1995). Nigeria is faced with the twin goal of meeting socioeconomic development and ensuring environmental sustainability simultaneously. The development of a nation’s environmental policy is very much dependent on its economic level, politics, and the environmental knowledge of its citizens (Ikporukpo, 1983 & 2002). This paper emerges from an ongoing PhD research on the evaluation of environmental policies in Nigeria, the lived experiences of victims of environmental degradation in Nigeria and a better approach to the topic of sustainability consciousness within the Nigerian context.
However, Nigeria has made some progress, and the overall record of accomplishment is mixed at best, and the reason for this is well known; bad governance, elevated levels of corruption, poor accountability, little or no checks and balances within the arms of government, written regulations being riddled with gaps and inconsistencies amongst policies (Goodland, 1992 & 1994). Also, environmental regulatory agencies lack funding and trained personnel, a duplication of targets and duties, public infrastructure needed to control certain environmental issues are yet to be built, difficulty to monitor small and informal firms within Nigeria, and most importantly, the political will to enforce and monitor regulations are often limited (Ikporukpo, 1983).
The major research question is, “can the needs of the environment be made a priority for Nigeria with the ever-raising socio-economic issues?”. This research adopts an interpretivist phenomenological analysis approach, whereby in-depth semi-structured interviews of both actors and stakeholders of environmental degradation in Nigeria, policy makers, and decision makers in oil companies, would be used to explore and interpret these events.
