Reconstructing Public Educational Administration through Indigenous Knowledge Systems: A Critical Integrative Synthesis and Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Public educational administration is expected to promote educational quality, equity, inclusion, cultural relevance, sustainability, accountability and meaningful community participation. Yet many administrative arrangements continue to operate through bureaucratic, managerial and technocratic assumptions that may marginalise locally grounded knowledge, relationships, histories, languages and ecological understandings. This article presents a critical integrative synthesis of scholarship on Indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), Indigenous and decolonising educational leadership, community governance, sustainability education and postcolonial educational administration. The synthesis argues that Indigenous knowledge should not be treated merely as cultural content to be inserted into existing administrative structures. Rather, it can provide alternative resources for understanding institutional purpose, authority, relationships, responsibility, knowledge, resources and educational practice. Earlier scholarship identified Indigenous knowledge, relationality, community participation and decolonisation as important; more recent scholarship increasingly moves the discussion toward institutional transformation, co-governance, epistemic justice and relational ethics. Building on this trajectory, the article develops the Indigenous Knowledge-Informed Public Education Administration and Management Framework (IK-IPEAM), comprising six interconnected dimensions: contextual and place-responsive administration; relational and participatory governance; intergenerational knowledge stewardship; ethical and holistic institutional stewardship; ecological and reciprocal resource management; and adaptive epistemic pluralism. Professional and administrative judgement is proposed as the interpretive mechanism through which these dimensions can inform contextually legitimate administrative practice. Four productive tensions—integration versus transformation, participation versus public accountability, Indigenous knowledge versus scientific knowledge, and cultural recognition versus institutional power—define the critical boundaries of the framework. The article does not present Indigenous knowledge as homogeneous or universally transferable, nor does it claim that IK-IPEAM has been empirically validated. Instead, it offers a theoretically grounded conceptual framework and propositions for future empirical investigation. Kenya is used as an application context because of its diverse communities and continuing emphasis on educational relevance, equity, participation and institutional accountability. The article concludes that meaningful reconstruction of public educational administration requires movement beyond symbolic recognition toward institutional arrangements in which knowledge, relationships, authority and accountability are reconsidered in ethically defensible ways.