Causal Effects of Creative Writing Poetics Reform on Institutional Accountability in Uganda: A Difference-in-Differences Design

While creative writing pedagogy has expanded across East Africa, its governance consequences remain theoretically underspecified and empirically unexamined. The analysis proposes that poetics reform—understood as the deliberate restructuring of writing instruction around aesthetic experimentation, narrative voice and critical reflexivity—may operate on accountability through three mechanisms: cultivating institutional critique, modelling transparent revision practices and reconfiguring authorial responsibility. A difference-in-differences design is elaborated for a natural experiment in which Ugandan universities adopted poetics-based curricula at staggered intervals. The framework addresses identification challenges including treatment spillover, curriculum drift and measurement validity, and specifies an original instrument for capturing accountability dispositions in writing artefacts. Rather than reporting empirical findings, the article establishes the theoretical grounding, identification strategy and measurement protocol necessary for future causal inquiry. The central contribution is to demonstrate that creative writing reform constitutes a testable institutional intervention rather than an aesthetic preference, with implications for education policy, arts governance and the methodology of causal inference in humanities education.