A Rationale for a Po...

Informal waste pickers are indispensable to material recovery and circular economy (CE) outcomes in Nigerian cities, yet they remain structurally invisible in official data systems, social protection schemes, and climate-governance frameworks. Drawing on doctoral research conducted in six high-intensity waste zones in Lagos and Abuja (n = 500 waste pickers, complemented by FGDs and KIIs), this article develops a policy-oriented rationale for a polycentric national digital registry for informal waste recovery pickers in Nigeria. The empirical evidence confirms that waste pickers contribute significantly to waste diversion, recycling and climate mitigation, while experiencing extreme socio-economic precarity, occupational health risks and systematic exclusion from municipal databases and digital platforms (e.g., EPR traceability systems, mobile payments). Existing digital initiatives in the Nigerian waste sector tend to prioritize aggregators and formal contractors, thereby deepening the “data injustice”—the erasure or instrumentalization of marginalized groups within digital economies. Against this backdrop, the article argues that a centralized, top-down registry would be ill-suited to the fragmented, multi-actor nature of Nigeria’s waste and climate governance landscape. Instead, it proposes a polycentric digital registry architecture anchored in Elinor Ostrom’s theory of polycentric governance and collective action, where multiple centers of authority—national agencies, state waste authorities, municipalities, cooperatives, producer responsibility organizations and civil-society partners—co-produce, steward and use registry data under shared rules. It concludes that a polycentric national digital registry is not merely a technical tool, but a governance reform capable of transforming informal waste pickers from “uncounted labour” into recognized partners in Nigeria’s circular economy, NDC implementation and just-transition agenda.