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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that accreditation is one of the least examined yet most powerful mechanisms through which coloniality continues to shape Development Studies. Drawing on Nigeria's first BSc Development Studies programme, it asks who defines legitimate development knowledge.

Paper long abstract

Efforts to decolonise Development Studies have focused largely on theories, pedagogies and reading lists while paying insufficient attention to the institutional mechanisms that determine what counts as legitimate knowledge in the first place. This paper argues that accreditation is one of the least examined yet most powerful mechanisms through which coloniality continues to shape Development Studies in the Global South.

Drawing on a reflective institutional case study of the establishment and accreditation of Nigeria's first BSc Development Studies programme at the National Open University of Nigeria (2019–2025), the paper examines how curriculum design, quality assurance and programme approval became sites where competing understandings of knowledge, legitimacy and authority were negotiated.

It argues that securing national regulatory approval required demonstrating conformity to internationally recognised standards whose assumptions about academic quality continue to derive disproportionately from Eurocentric traditions of knowledge production. Rather than functioning as politically neutral instruments, accreditation frameworks shape what knowledge becomes legitimate, what curricula become possible, and whose intellectual traditions acquire authority.

Using curriculum documents, accreditation evidence and institutional records, the paper shows how Nigeria's Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) simultaneously constrain and enable curricular innovation. It concludes that meaningful decolonisation requires transforming not only curriculum content but also the institutional structures that govern academic legitimacy.