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Paper short abstract

This paper assesses community-led flood adaptation in Lagos coastal slums. It explores how informal agency creates alternative governance where state systems fail, seeking to shift narratives from mere resilience to transformative climate justice in Nigeria.

Paper long abstract

This study assesses community-led flood adaptation strategies through a comparative analysis of three coastal slum communities in Lagos, Nigeria: Ajegunle, Ijora-Badia, and Makoko. In an era of intensifying climate precarity, these coastal slums exist at a critical intersection of environmental risk and rapid, unplanned urbanization, where formal urban governance has historically marginalized the urban poor through exclusionary planning and a lack of protective infrastructure. We utilized a mixed-methods approach; structured questionnaires were administered to residents to capture lived experiences of flood risk, while Key Informant Interviews (KII) were conducted with community leaders and local stakeholders to understand localized decision-making processes. Preliminary findings reveal that formal top-down policies often reproduce systemic spatial inequalities, forcing residents to deploy their own "informal agency" to fill the vacuum of state-led interventions. These inventive communal strategies—ranging from the iconic stilt-supported architecture of Makoko to indigenous drainage engineering and localized social alert networks in Ajegunle and Ijora-Badia—constitute a vital, alternative form of urban governance. By evaluating these practices, we seek to move the discourse beyond simple coping mechanisms toward a transformative adaptation framework that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between the state, nature, and society. Ultimately, the paper highlights the political significance of grassroots innovation, arguing that formal development paradigms must learn from and support the informal, justice-driven futures already being built by actors on the frontlines of the climate crisis in Nigeria.