Navigating Politics, Change, and Well-Being in Local Colleges: A Meta-Synthesis of Faculty and Administrator Narratives as the Basis for the REACT-KNP Policy Model

This article presents a meta-synthesis of eighteen qualitative and qual-dominant studies examining how faculty and administrators in Philippine local universities and colleges (LUCs) experience and navigate the intertwined challenges of local politics, organisational change, and well-being. Guided by PRISMA 2020 and JBI Critical Appraisal protocols, the review distilled three major themes—political influences on governance, leadership and change practices, and occupational well-being—across diverse LUC contexts from Luzon to Mindanao. From this synthesis, we derived the REACT-KNP policy model, which outlines five cyclical steps (Revisit, Empower, Adapt, Capture, Transform) underpinned by a Knowledge–Negotiation–Protection (KNP) safeguard to promote resilient and sustainable reform. Key implications include the need for multi-year LGU compacts to stabilize funding, inclusive governance structures to buffer leadership transitions, and integrated well-being supports to mitigate faculty precarity. By foregrounding lived narratives and evidence-based strategies, the study offers actionable guidance for strengthening LUC capacity and faculty resilience in decentralised higher education settings.