Assessment of Green Entrepreneurship Initiatives for Sustainable Business Practices in the Manufacturing Sector in North Central Nigeria: A Conceptual Review.

Abstract

Sustainable industrial development has become an urgent priority for emerging economies facing environmental degradation, resource constraints, and climate-related vulnerabilities. In Nigeria, the manufacturing sector remains central to economic diversification efforts but is simultaneously limited by high energy intensity, waste generation, and inefficient production systems. This conceptual review synthesizes peer‐reviewed literature, government documents, policy frameworks, and credible grey sources to examine the emergence and trajectory of green entrepreneurship within the manufacturing sector of North Central Nigeria. Using a narrative review methodology, the study analyzes 86 carefully selected sources published between 2016 and 2025, guided by explicit inclusion criteria, multi-database searches, and triangulation procedures to ensure credibility. The findings reveal that green entrepreneurship in the region is expanding through initiatives in solar energy integration, agro-industrial waste valorisation, climate-responsive agricultural processing, and emerging minerals-to-manufacturing value chains. However, these developments remain uneven across states, constrained by institutional fragmentation, weak policy implementation, limited technical capacity, inadequate green financing, and infrastructural deficits. The analysis highlights a hybrid ecosystem in which top-down government directives coexist with bottom-up private-sector adaptation, but lack the coordinated frameworks required for long-term sustainability. The review contributes to the literature by providing a region-specific, comparative synthesis and by demonstrating how theoretical perspectives such as the resource-based view, ecological orientation theory, and institutional theory explain the enabling conditions and barriers shaping sustainable manufacturing in the region. It concludes that enhancing policy coherence, expanding green finance, strengthening technical capabilities, and developing coordinated green industrial clusters are essential for accelerating Nigeria’s transition toward environmentally responsible manufacturing.