Registered but Unrecognised: Formalisation as Epistemic Injustice in Rural Cooperative Governance in Yorùbá Ethnic Group in Osun State, Nigeria

This conceptual article argues that formalisation is, fundamentally, an epistemic intervention. Drawing on decolonial theory, Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice, and Indigenous data sovereignty scholarship, the article develops a framework for rural cooperative governance in Yorùbá-speaking Osun State, southwest Nigeria. Two constructs are introduced: epistemic jurisdiction, the institutionally conferred authority to determine what counts as valid governance knowledge, and governance-knowledge disqualification, the process by which an incumbent repertoire becomes unusable within a formal institution’s own procedures. Four disqualification mechanisms are specified (testimonial disqualification, hermeneutical erasure, documentary substitution, and extractive knowledge capture) and cross-classified against epistemic recognition to derive four recognition regimes: Autonomous Vernacular, Extractive Formalisation, Symbolic Recognition, and Codified Pluralism. Twelve propositions and five institutional design instruments specify how the fourth might be constructed. Theoretically, the article proposes jurisdictional epistemic injustice as a distinct form in which a knowledge system is denied standing to govern irrespective of whether its holders are believed, and moves decolonial cooperative scholarship from critique toward institutional design. It concludes by rejecting the romanticist inference that vernacular governance is thereby just, and specifies the boundary conditions under which recognition should be constrained.