Over the years, Nigeria has had various administrations that have made considerable changes in the government and policy areas, all with the aim of promoting governance, enhancing the transparency and accountability in public sector management, good economic management as well as tackling the challenges of corruption, insecurity and institutional weaknesses in the country. This review aims to systematically review the empirical and conceptual literature on policy-making in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic (1999-2025) to synthesis evidence on the institutional drivers that have been at work behind the governance reforms, and eventually the policy outcomes over the two decades. The systematic review method based on PRISMA was used to retrieve peer-reviewed studies from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, which were then screened according to the previously established inclusion criteria and finally synthesized by using narrative and thematic analysis. The findings reveal four main thematic clusters: governance capacity, institutional accountability, corruption and elite capture, and decentralization. The results indicate that in the course of the last two decades, Nigeria has gone through an unprecedented proliferation of institutions and reforms but the policy outcomes have not been uniform and have mostly been incremental. The legal frameworks and institutions created by formal reforms have often been quite extensive, but, unfortunately, no improvements in enforcement, bureaucratic capacity or accountability have been made concurrently with the legal extensions. The dominance of the executive, lack of checks among institutions, capture by the elite, and informal governance practices continue to mediate and limit the transformations brought about by reforms. In conclusion, while the review confirms that governance reforms in the Fourth Republic of Nigeria have led to the emergence of modest and fragile gains rather than the transformation of institutions, it asserts that the study is an important addition to the governance and political debates.
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