School Governance in Morocco: Tools and Resources for the Project Manager, an Integrative Literature Review

Abstract

The governance of Moroccan public schools stands at the intersection of two converging scientific gaps: on the one hand, the absence of an integrative theoretical framework articulating New Public Management, school leadership, project management and digital governance at the meso level of the school; and on the other hand, the absence of any unified operational definition of the concepts of tools and resources, even though these concepts are central to the legislative prescription of the principal's role. This article presents an integrative literature review (Torraco, 2005; Whittemore & Knafl, 2005; Snyder, 2019) conducted on WoS and Scopus via IMIST-CNRST (June 2026), covering the period 2015-2026 for indexed articles and without temporal restriction for foundational works. An adapted PRISMA protocol enabled the selection of 58 scientific sources (51 indexed articles, 7 reference academic works) from an initial pool of 603 records, based on explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria. Thematic analysis reveals five clusters structuring the field and yields an original contribution: a unified operational definition of tools (technical and normative devices enabling the exercise of the principal's dynamic capabilities, in the sense of Teece, 2018) and resources (human, relational, informational and cognitive assets that can be effectively mobilised, in the sense of Barney, 1991 and Abernethy et al., 2021), hitherto absent from the school leadership literature. The discussion identifies six converging shortcomings and sketches the exploratory conceptual framework GOVPRO-Maroc, presented as a proposition that is not yet stabilised and remains subject to empirical validation with a multi-stakeholder sample from the Tanger-Tétouan-Al Hoceïma region, within the framework of an ongoing mixed-methods design.

JEL Classification: I21, I28, M10, H83, O33

Paper type: Theoretical Research (integrative literature review)