Nuances of context and complexity shape the function and meaning of accreditation, contend NWU Business School’s Joseph Sekhampu and Geraldine Meyers . Here, they outline the circumstances in which alignment shifts away from validating established systems and becomes an ongoing institutional process of constructing and sustaining coherence The architecture of alignment
A ccreditation rests on an implicit promise available, that alignment can be maintained throughout the institution and that the distance between strategy and execution is manageable. In contexts where these conditions do not hold, accreditation begins to operate differently. From an African vantage point, for instance, it is encountered not as a process of confirming coherence, but as an ongoing effort to produce it under conditions where this coherence cannot be taken for granted. If accreditation, at its most demanding, is a test of coherence under pressure, then its deeper meaning is unlikely to be revealed in environments where coherence is already embedded. Instead, such meaning becomes visible in institutions where alignment must be actively constructed, where institutional intent is that institutional quality can be made visible through coherent systems, aligned processes and demonstrable outcomes. Yet, this promise carries assumptions that coherence is structurally repeatedly negotiated against operational realities and where the relationship between evidence and practice cannot be assumed to be intact. In such contexts, accreditation ceases to function as a periodic verification of quality and becomes a continuous institutional discipline.
Accreditation as institutional work There is a long-standing tendency to treat accreditation frameworks as something originating elsewhere that must be interpreted and implemented within local conditions. At the level of standards, this remains true: language relating to the assurance of learning, impact, faculty sufficiency and continuous improvement is globally codified. However, this perspective obscures an important shift that occurs in practice. It assumes that accreditation is primarily about translation across contexts, when in reality it often becomes a process of reconstruction in settings such as those in evidence across Africa. Furthermore, in more stable systems, accreditation functions as verification. It confirms that institutional processes operate as designed and that alignment is maintained between teaching, research and participation. Yet, this logic is inverted in more complex environments. In these instances, accreditation requires institutions to build coherence where it is not structurally embedded. Alignment cannot be inherited from predictable governance, integrated systems or stable resource flows. It must be deliberately produced in organisational silos, uneven capabilities and shifting constraints.
38 Ambition • ISSUE 5 • 2026
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