Vertical Legal Borrowing and Environmental Governance: Bridging Institutional Gaps for Climate Intervention and Natural Resource Management in Developing Countries

Climate change has compelled both developed and developing countries to seek innovative regulatory responses to environmental degradation and carbon emissions. While international environmental law provides broad normative guidance, it lacks precise instruments for the governance of emergent climate-intervention technologies such as carbon-dioxide removal (CDR) and solar-radiation management (SRM). In this context, domestic legal systems increasingly serve as experimental laboratories for designing governance approaches that may later diffuse to the international plane. This paper explores <i>vertical legal borrowing</i> the process by which national or sub-national legal innovations inform international environmental law and assesses its potential to bridge governance gaps in developing countries, particularly in Nigeria. Using qualitative doctrinal and comparative methods, the article examines constitutional, statutory, and judicial frameworks regulating environmental protection and natural-resource management, comparing them with examples from the Netherlands, Brazil, India, and the United States. It hypothesizes that vertical legal borrowing enhances environmental governance effectiveness in developing countries by fostering reciprocal learning between domestic and international legal systems. The study concludes that developing countries can move from norm-takers to norm-shapers by translating domestic experiences into the evolving international architecture of sustainable environmental governance.