Collaborative Governance and Sustainable Youth Empowerment in Lagos and Osun States, Nigeria

Abstract

Youth empowerment in Nigeria continues to be constrained by limited access to learning opportunities, skills acquisition, employment, entrepreneurial financing, leadership inclusion, and democratic participation, particularly within fragmented subnational governance systems. When institutionalised effectively, collaboration among pertinent stakeholders provides a structured mechanism through which youth empowerment initiatives can be planned, financed, and sustained. This study is grounded in collaborative governance theory to examine how institutionalised stakeholder engagement shapes youth empowerment outcomes at the subnational level. Youth empowerment is conceptualised through empowerment theory as a multidimensional expansion of economic, social, and political agency, while transformative governance provides a normative lens for assessing the sustainability and institutional embeddedness of these outcomes.
The study adopted an explanatory sequential mixed-methods methodology to examine youth empowerment efforts in Lagos and Osun States, which represent two divergent governance contexts within Nigeria's federal system. Quantitative survey data from youth beneficiaries are integrated with qualitative interviews of institutional actors to evaluate the impact of collaborative arrangements on empowerment outcomes and the sustainability of youth empowerment programmes over time.
The results reveal that formal stakeholder engagement substantially predicts enhancements in economic, educational, and civic empowerment outcomes. Nonetheless, inadequate coordination structures, insufficient youth representation in decision-making processes, and financial limitations hinder sustainability. The research contends that sustained youth empowerment is optimally perceived as a governance result influenced by the quality of collaboration infrastructure, rather than only by the extent of programme scope or the magnitude of finance.
This paper situates youth empowerment within the framework of collaborative governance studies, extending theoretical insights to subnational contexts in the Global South and emphasising the institutional requirements that enable multi-actor arrangements to provide sustainable developmental outcomes.