Leading Schools Through Crisis: Participative Leadership, Institutional Resilience, and the Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon's South West Region

The global literature on educational leadership in conflict-affected settings has focused primarily on access and protection, with limited attention to the governance mechanisms that determine whether conflict-affected schools can maintain educational quality and institutional coherence during sustained disruption. This article addresses this gap by reporting qualitative findings from 24 in-depth interviews with principals, teachers, and teacher leaders across diverse secondary schools in Fako Division, South West Region of Cameroon — a region experiencing acute educational disruption from the Anglophone socio-political crisis since 2016. Qualitative thematic analysis identified the Anglophone crisis as a 'leadership crucible': a context that simultaneously constrains participative governance through physical disruption, institutional fragmentation, and the demand for rapid crisis-management decision-making, while catalysing it through the experiential discovery of collective intelligence as the decisive institutional resilience resource. Principals who had invested in participative leadership before the crisis found it their most resilient governance asset during it; crisis conditions forced some principals toward participative practices they had not previously developed, with several describing crisis-born collaborative decision-making habits that have become permanent governance practices. The article proposes a crisis-participative leadership model identifying the conditions under which crisis catalyses rather than constrains the development of distributed school governance, and develops implications for educational recovery planning in conflict-affected settings.

educational leadership in conflict, school resilience

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