State Capacity and Resource Starvation: Assessing the Impact of Policy Inconsistencies on Domestic Food Access and Infrastructure Resilience in Nigeria

Nigeria has launched several agricultural and climate-smart policies since 2016, yet food access has worsened. This article uses Van Meter and Van Horn’s policy implementation model to examine how inconsistent policy and limited state capacity affect physical access to food and logistics. It draws on 20 in-depth interviews with officials and association representatives and two focus group discussions with smallholder farmers and food traders, all held in Abuja, read against budget and policy documents. Participants described funding that is thin and slow to be released, weak communication between agencies that hold climate data and those that hold agricultural budgets, and discontinuity between policy cycles. The move from the Agricultural Promotion Policy (2016–2020) to the National Agricultural Technology and Innovation Policy (2022–2027) is the main example, with planned cold hubs, irrigation and farm roads reported as stalled. Because both policies were launched under the same federal administration, the discontinuity is attributed to shifting appointments, ministerial priorities and policy-cycle gaps and not to a change of president alone. Without storage and transport, smallholders reported selling to intermediaries at low prices and losing produce, which traders linked to higher retail prices. The sample is small and Abuja-based, so findings are exploratory. The article recommends protecting multi-year capital projects, reporting budget performance against the 2003 Maputo target, a shared cross-agency data platform, and decentralised solar cold hubs and flood-resilient roads.