A systematic review of school governance literature between 2000 and 2023

School governance is a contested and complex concept owing to continuing differences and disagreements over its meaning and application. As a result, school governance is conceptually overloaded and over-used as an analytic and object of research especially within sub-fields of education literature like leadership, management, and administration (ELMA). Cognizant of the fact that scholars worldwide are endeavouring to differentiate the ELMA knowledge base, we consider it important for researchers across the ELMA field to engage with this contested terrain of knowledge production, hence our critical engagement with school governance literature published between 2000 and 2023. We followed the PRISMA guidelines to identify the document dataset sourced from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. A thorough screening and filtering process yielded 361 journal articles used as the database for this systematic literature review. Employing both statistical and qualitative methods, we explore the volume and geographic distribution of said literature, as well as map the intellectual and conceptual structures constituting the school governance field. Statistical results point to interesting findings in terms of volume, geographic incidence and publication outlets, while a critical narrative synthesis of the 361 publications enabled us to construct a conceptual framework based on five main themes: school participation politics; autonomy and control; policy reform trends; global education confluences and influences; and digital governance. These findings yield important insight for future research relevant to theory, policy, and practice while simultaneously identifying blind spots and gaps in the field, thus laying the groundwork for future knowledge production.