Green by Necessity? Rethinking Environmental Intent in Entrepreneurship Theory through Nigeria's CNG Transition

Abstract Existing theories of green entrepreneurship treat environmental intent as definitional: ventures count as green because founders pursue environmental and economic value jointly. Existing technology adoption theory answers a different question, how an actor comes to accept a new technology, not how an actor abandons one that already works, a gap that persists even in extensions such as UTAUT2 that add an explicit price-value construct. Both leave unaccounted a class of cases in which an actor under economic threat abandons a functioning incumbent technology for a substitute, producing an environmentally beneficial outcome that was never a criterion in the decision. We develop this gap through Nigeria's 2023 petrol subsidy removal, which precipitated large-scale conversion of ride-hailing vehicles to compressed natural gas (CNG) through informal, driver-organized channels running alongside a formal government program. Building on push-pull-mooring theory, we model a switching appraisal jointly shaped by an economic push, structural moorings (infrastructure, conversion cost), social moorings (informal finance, peer influence), and pull restricted to cost saving and reliability, with environmental concern definitionally excluded; experiential learning, moderated by structural moorings, then converts initial compelled switching into sustained adaptation. Within this model we define economically compelled green adaptation, a construct naming adoption in which environmental concern or benefit is absent from the decision calculus throughout, and distinguish it from deliberate green entrepreneurship, regulatory compliance, and state-incentivized adoption. Five propositions specify how push, pull, and mooring combine to produce, and sustain, an environmentally beneficial outcome that no green entrepreneurship or technology adoption framework, on its own, is built to represent.