Governing the paradox: regenerative coordination in Nigeria’s energy transition

This study developed and tested a system-level account of sustainability coordination in Africa’s extractives-to-energy transition, addressing the absence of a validated construct that captures how multi-actor coordination shapes regenerative outcomes when legacy extractive assets simultaneously constrain and enable decarbonisation. We introduced the Resource Regeneration Coordination Index (RRCI) and the Multi-Actor Resource Regeneration Systems Framework (MARSF), theorising coordination strength as an emergent ecosystem property comprising inter-firm regenerative alignment, socio-environmental embedding, and cross-sectoral resilience integration. Using 42 semi-structured interviews across three Nigerian transition corridors to generate and refine measures, we then surveyed 372 ecosystem participants spanning operators, renewable developers, EPC firms, financiers, regulators, grid actors, and community-facing leaders. Confirmatory factor analysis supports reliability and convergent and discriminant validity for RRCI’s sub-dimensions, and a two-stage higher-order composite model yields consistent measurement performance. Structural estimation indicates that regenerative alignment predicts environmental regeneration, socio-environmental embedding predicts community resilience, and resilience integration predicts ecosystem legitimacy, with substantial explained variance across outcomes. Cross-validation assessment indicates out-of-sample utility, and multigroup comparisons across three ecosystem archetypes reveal context-contingent path strengths. Conceptually, we formalised a regenerative coordination paradox: extractive infrastructures become transition platforms only when alignment, embedding, and resilience routines cohere. In practice, RRCI provides an auditable diagnostic for targeting guarantees, contractual covenants, remediation oversight, and disclosure alignment at the weakest coordination links in transition governance.