Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the establishment of Nigeria's first BSc Development Studies programme. It interrogates the strategic reliance on North-based standards (EADI) to secure national legitimacy (NUC), framing this not as hypocrisy but as a "structural entanglement" that shapes decolonial agency.

Paper long abstract

The global call to decolonise development studies often overlooks the "infrastructures of legitimacy" that govern academic programme establishment in the Global South. Drawing on the author’s experience as the pioneer Head of Department (2019-2025) who led the accreditation of Nigeria’s first BSc Development Studies programme at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN), this paper interrogates the “Accreditation Paradox”. It argues that securing national regulatory approval from the National Universities Commission (NUC) necessitated a tactical reliance on Northern academic networks, specifically the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), to define "quality".

​Rather than viewing this reliance as a decolonial failure, the paper theorises it as a "structural entanglement". Using curriculum matrices and accreditation documents as primary evidence, it reveals how power operates within these administrative gatekeeping technologies. The paper examines the tension within the NUC’s Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS), where the 70% mandated "core" often reproduces Eurocentric lineages, while the 30% institutional space offers a fragile site for epistemic innovation.

​By locating decolonisation within curriculum matrices and regulatory negotiations, the paper reframes the process as institutional, negotiated, and inevitably compromised. It concludes that institutional agency in the Global South is not about rejecting Northern standards in isolation but about navigating their gatekeeping power to carve out spaces for epistemic justice. This "compromised" agency is proposed as a more honest and empirically grounded site for reimagining development futures.