Guns, governance and green futures in West Africa: empirical evidence from fixed effects and quantile models

This paper investigates the impact of institutions, militarisation, and economic growth on environmental pressures in West Africa between 1996 and 2024 with fixed effects and Driscoll-Kraay standard errors and methods-of-moments quantile regression. The study employs CO2 emissions per capita as a measure of environmental pressure, militarisation proxied as military expenditure as a share of GDP, governance indicators and economic growth given as GDP per capita growth. The study found that an increase in military spending is associated with increases in CO2 emissions and that such negative impacts of militarisation persist over all levels of emissions. In addition, environmental damages associated with militarisation are significantly reduced by improvements in institutional quality given a negative and significant interaction variable. In these findings, it is revealed that economic growth is not enough in West Africa to pursue a green future. Effective policies should aim at minimising the environmental consequences of security spending and strengthen institutional capacities. Development cooperation should be coordinated at the regional level in West Africa; better security, investing and development should be coordinated with low-carbon transitions, and enforcement should be strengthened.