Green transition or implementation illusion? Climate budgeting and public procurement alignment in Nigerian states

This study examines how state-level budgeting and public procurement shape climate implementation within Nigeria’s federal system. It argues that climate governance is not secured by statutory ambition alone, but by whether climate priorities enter the fiscal and contractual routines through which subnational governments allocate resources, procure goods and services, and govern delivery. Drawing on the climate governance, green budgeting, and sustainable procurement literatures, the article identifies a persistent gap: the weak treatment of budgeting and procurement as linked institutional channels of subnational climate action. The study adopts a sequential explanatory mixed-methods design that combines documentary scoring of budgets, procurement records, and policy texts across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (2021–2025) with comparative case analysis and 36 elite interviews across six contrasting states. Three constructs are developed: Climate Budgeting Alignment, Green Public Procurement Alignment, and a composite State Climate Implementation Alignment index. The findings show substantial inter-state variation. Procurement reform advanced further than climate budgeting, with a mean Green Public Procurement Alignment of 60.37 compared with a Climate Budgeting Alignment of 53.21 on a 0–100 scale, and 31.4 per cent of jurisdictions achieving substantive procurement alignment, compared with 22.7 per cent for budgeting. Yet both domains remained uneven, and procurement gains concentrated in formal wording rather than lifecycle costing and contract monitoring. Higher implementation capacity was associated with stronger coordination, administrative capability, and the joint embedding of climate priorities across budget and procurement systems. The study contributes to climate governance theory, public procurement scholarship, and Nigerian policy by demonstrating that subnational climate transition depends on institutional alignment within the state’s allocative and contractual core.