Digital Public Administration Degrees for Arab Civil Servants who Cannot Leave the Desk

Abstract

Public-sector reform programmes often send a few officials on a residential course and hope the ministry changes. This study evaluates an ALU public-policy master’s pathway for civil servants in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco who remained in post. Capstones that mapped one service journey — licensing, social protection, or municipal permit — produced usable process maps. Capstones that wrote ‘transformation strategies’ did not. The constraint was not theory. It was permission to use internal data and a university ethics process that understood state secrecy. ALU should maintain a public-sector research ethics lane and teach reform as operations. An Arab digital university is well placed to do this because the student never has to abandon the counter they are trying to fix.