An early-career geographer specialising in Social-Ecological Systems (SES) and institutional governance of natural resources in extractive contexts. My research integrates Elinor Ostrom’s SES framework with Deweyan pragmatist instrumentalism, political ecology, and historical institutionalism to examine multi-level politics of resource extraction, contested property rights, and livelihood trade-offs at national, state, and customary levels.
Focusing on resource extract contexts , I designed and operationalised an innovative adaptive SES diagnostic framework to examining complex, indeterminate governance situations in terrestrial, coastal and marine social-ecological systems of the Niger Delta. My fieldwork engaged farming and fishing communities, water transportation operators, and recreational beach users, revealing how oil and gas mining intersects with terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, customary resource rights, and livelihoods in communities near oilfields. A key output is the paper “Whose Property Right Counts?”, which critically reviews the interrelationships between national petroleum legislation, the Land Use Act, customary rights regimes, and SES stewardship and safeguards in oil mining contexts. I believe that my theoretical and empirical work provides transferable insights into contested rights regimes, including emerging debates on legal personhood for rivers and kin-centric (relational/indigenous) approaches to water governance. I am particularly interested in applying pragmatist problem-solving tools to bridge formal legal frameworks with community-based ontologies in efforts to address ecological crises in riverine and coastal environments.