From COVID-19 to fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria: Unveiling local governance (un)changes through collective action.

Some global challenges do not only precipitate unprecedented dynamics in the lives of people, but they also orchestrate governance changes across governmental levels. Existing academic research have interrogated the changing context of local governance under destabilising circumstances, as well as demonstrated the rapid and radical potentials of local governments for crisis management. However, how about scenarios of unchanges – what this study conceives as the inability to adapt local governance and blanket policies to in-the-moment local realities, or failing to draw lessons from past mis-governance?

How do publics protest these manifestations? Two crisis cycles that posed severe economic hardship on ordinary Nigerians – the COVID-19 pandemic [2020] and the fuel subsidy removal policy [2023] – are interesting cases by which this study examines characteristic changes and unchanges to local governance processes, inter-governmental relations, and collective agency against local governance improprieties. This study conceives the associative expressions of the poor and vulnerable at local levels as manifestations of collective action incentivised by local mis-governance. It further suggests that the failure of the government to strategically engage with local government structures to drive a bottom-up intervention strategy and bespoke local emergency response [in 2023] is a repeat of the COVID-19 pandemic experience. However, across both cycles, this study identifies changes in the forms and manifestations of revolt and collective action among poor and vulnerable populations at local levels.