RE-CONCEPTUALISING CIVIC EDUCATION FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: AN ANALYTICAL SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF CURRICULUM COHERENCE AND PEDAGOGICAL TRANSFORMATION IN ZAMBIAN SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Abstract

Civic Education has re-entered global education discourse as a mechanism through which school systems translate abstract commitments to democracy and sustainability into the everyday competencies of young citizens. In Zambia, the 2023 Competency-Based Curriculum repositions the subject as a vehicle for cultivating learners who are not only informed but demonstrably capable of participatory, ethical and sustainability-oriented action, a positioning that resonates with Vision 2030, the African Union's Agenda 2063 and Sustainable Development Goal 4.7. Yet the literature on how this positioning is realised inside secondary-school classrooms remains scattered across curriculum studies, comparative education and development-policy scholarship, rarely read against one another. This desk-based systematic review addresses that fragmentation by synthesising forty-two peer-reviewed articles, policy documents and institutional reports published between 2010 and 2025, identified through a PRISMA-aligned search of multidisciplinary databases and appraised for relevance and methodological credibility. Rather than cataloguing findings study by study, the review reads them against one another to establish where the literature converges, where it disagrees, and why those disagreements matter. It finds strong normative convergence around the desirability of competency-based, sustainability-infused civic learning, but sharp disagreement over whether curriculum reform alone can offset entrenched examination cultures, uneven teacher preparedness and thin contextualisation of global citizenship content. Building on this analysis, the review proposes a four-pillar Sustainable Development-Oriented Civic Education (SD-OCE) model and argues that re-conceptualising the subject requires simultaneous, rather than sequential, reform of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. The paper closes with recommendations for policy actors, curriculum developers and teacher-education institutions in Zambia and comparable African contexts.