Nigeria has gradually integrated its national development and environmental governance frameworks with the most salient international agreements on sustainable development, such as the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. But the degree of effective implementation of these commitments at the domestic level has been challenged. This study compares Nigeria’s international commitments on sustainable development and policy implementation on sustainable development at the national level with emphasis on policy implementation gaps. The study is qualitative and documentary research, which is limited to secondary data from the following policy and legal documents of the country, national development plans, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) reports, Voluntary National Reviews, climate-policy instruments, and relevant peer-reviewed literature and international policy reports. Data were analysed thematically around five dimensions of implementation: policy alignment, institutional coordination, financing and resource mobilisation, monitoring and accountability, and subnational localisation. The results show that Nigeria has relatively well formalised linkages between international commitments and domestic policy frameworks such as SDG Implementation Plan 2020-2030, Nationally Determined Contributions, Climate Change Act 2021 and environmental policies. However, significant implementation challenges remain in inter-institutional coordination, financing, policy coherence, accountability and subnational capacity. The performance on implementation of the SDGs is also uneven, as evidenced based on Nigeria’s 2025 Third Voluntary National Review, where 34.6% of the assessed SDG indicators improved, 30.8% remained the same, and 34.6% worsened. The study findings show that the implementation-governance gap is becoming an emerging challenge of sustainable development in Nigeria rather than policy commitments. It suggests increased policy coordination across all levels of government, tying public spending to sustainability goals, better financing of the climate and environment, addressing accountability for corrective action through monitoring, building capacity at subnational level to implement policy, and consolidating existing policies instead of creating new ones. The study builds on the literature of “sustainable-development governance” by providing a case study for the need to look at institutional and policy mechanisms that attempt to make global sustainable-development commitments concrete in a developing-country setting.

Keywords: Sustainable Development, Global Environmental Commitments and Domestic Policy Implementation.