Dr Portia Roelofs

Dr Roelofs works at the intersection of politics, development studies and political theory. Her research explores themes of governance, accountability and ideology, with a geographic focus on Nigeria.

Dr Roelofs’ book Good governance in Nigeria: Rethinking accountability and transparency in the twenty-first century draws on in-depth qualitative fieldwork on the ‘Lagos Model’ in southwest Nigeria to propose new, socially-embedded conceptions of accountability and transparency. She has convened workshops and panels on ideas, ideology and values in African politics.

Dr Roelofs' work includes interests in ideology, governance reform and political economy, exploring the development of public-private partnerships, as well as the politics and political economy of knowledge production in and about Africa.

She has conducted fieldwork in Nigeria's southwest (Lagos and Oyo) and northeast (Borno and Adamawa) on local governance, resilience and climate adaptation. She has degrees from Oxford, SOAS and the London School of Economics and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Ibadan and IFRA-Ibadan. From 2019-2022 she was Clayman-Fulford Junior Research Fellow in Politics and Political Thought at St Anne’s College, Oxford.

She is co-convenor of the Political Studies Association special group on Global Development Politics and sits on the editorial board of the African Arguments book series. Dr Roelofs has served on the council of the African Studies Association UK and has served as convenor of the Global South Research Group. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Publications

Books

Good governance in Nigeria: Rethinking accountability and transparency in the twenty-first century (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Nigerian edition published by Noirledge Publishing, Ibadan August 2024.

Reviewed in Democratization; Journal of Modern African Studies; Perspectives on Politics: Journal of Development Studies; Progress in Development Studies; Commonwealth and Comparative Politics; and LSE Review of Books.

Journal articles

Large Grant-Funded Research Centres and Concept Generation in Development Research, Journal of Development Studies, Dec 2024 (Online) 

Hidden contestation: Valence issues, methodological blindness and the politics of development in Nigeria Democratization, Early view 1-24 2024

Urban renewal in Ibadan, Nigeria: World class but essentially Yoruba. African Affairs, 2021 (open access) 120 (480)

The death of political possibility? Reading State and Society in Nigeria 40 years on. Review of African Political Economy, 2022.

Contesting localisation in interfaith peacebuilding in Northern Nigeria. Oxford Development Studies, 2020. (Open access via this link.)

Making pandemic politics transparent: lessons from Nigeria, Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy (2020) Vol 28 (3).

Flying in the univer-topia: white people on planes, #RhodesMustFall and climate emergency, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 2019.

Beyond programmatic versus patrimonial politics: Contested conceptions of legitimate distribution in Nigeria. Journal of Modern African Studies, 2019, 57 (3).

Transparency and mistrust: Who or what should be made transparent? Governance, 2019, 32 (3)

Writing for non-academic audiences

African parties are more ideological than you think, Democracy in Africa, with Dan Paget

President Tinubu: An Ambivalent Record? African Arguments 2023

Jacobin (2019) The Nigerian Activist Whose Death Shamed Shell

Democracy in Africa (2019) Should politicians give money to the poor in Nigeria?

GIZ (2017) Civil Society, Religion and the State: Mapping of Borno and Adamawa

Renewal - How Nigerian debates about transparency can help public scrutiny of the UK’s Covid 19 response

Website