Climate Change and Corporations: Regulating Corporate Participation in Climate Change Mitigation in Nigeria

Abstract

Corporations contribute over 71 per cent of global carbon emissions and are, therefore, the leading sources of the climate change problem. Nevertheless, they generally have apathy to participating in climate change mitigation by curbing their emissions or investing in low-carbon transition and mitigation projects, particularly in Nigeria and other developing countries. The weak legal and regulatory frameworks in these countries are exploited by corporations to evade their climate change obligations despite their significant contribution to the problem. This thesis critically analyses the prospects of overhauling the legal framework of climate change regulation of corporations in Nigeria through the implementation of the dilute interventionism paradigm. It argues that Nigeria should directly intervene through legislative mechanisms to compel corporations to incorporate climate change mitigation in their business activities. It proposes that this direct intervention should comprise of prescriptive and facilitative mechanisms structured in a dilute interventionism regulatory model with the strictest interventionist instruments at the foundation and de-escalation to milder prescriptive instruments based on increased corporate compliance. Adopting this model will halt the culture of regulatory impunity that corporations have imbibed in Nigeria and other developing countries. The thesis further argues that implementing this model requires the institution of a strong and independent regulator with a veto firewall protection system that guarantees its de facto independence from government and external influences. The thesis adopts a socio-legal research methodology in analysing the various legal mechanisms and alternative regulatory systems for corporate regulation and the regulatory theories developed in the literature for curtailing corporate excesses. It also undertakes a review of the successful implementation of an exemplar of the dilute interventionism model in the banking sector in Nigeria to establish the feasibility of the model for effectively reforming and incentivising corporate participation in a targeted sector - in this case, climate change mitigation. Although focusing on Nigeria, the analysis in this thesis has broader application to other developing countries around the globe with similar legal, regulatory and socio-economic circumstances as Nigeria.