Repositioning Public Administration Education for Twenty-First-Century Governance: A Competency-Based Framework for Curriculum Reform in Nigeria

Abstract

The changing character of twenty-first-century governance has exposed growing misalignment between the competencies required of public administrators and the educational models that prepare them. Digital government, artificial intelligence, climate change, fiscal pressures, and rising citizen expectations demand public servants with analytical, technological, ethical, and collaborative capabilities. Yet Public Administration education in many developing countries, including Nigeria, remains largely content-driven and lecture-centred. Although competency-based education, governance capacity, and curriculum reform have each attracted increasing scholarly attention, these strands of literature remain insufficiently integrated, limiting their practical value for curriculum transformation. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a competency-oriented framework for repositioning Public Administration education in Nigeria. Adopting a qualitative theory-building conceptual approach, it synthesises contemporary scholarship on governance, competency-based education, experiential learning, and curriculum innovation. The analysis is principally informed by Experiential Learning Theory and the competency-based education paradigm, while drawing complementary insights from governance capacity and public value perspectives. The study identifies six core competency domains essential for contemporary public service and integrates them into the proposed Public Administration Competency Development Framework (PACDF), which links curriculum relevance, experiential learning, competency development, institutional partnerships, authentic assessment, and continuous professional development into a coherent educational model. The paper argues that effective curriculum reform requires a systemic realignment of teaching, learning, assessment, and professional engagement with contemporary governance demands. The PACDF provides a theoretically grounded framework to guide curriculum reform, support governance capacity development, and serve as a basis for future empirical research in Nigeria and comparable developing-country contexts.

Keywords: Public Administration education; competency-based education; governance capacity; curriculum reform; experiential learning; higher education; Nigeria.