South African public universities face converging pressures that compliance-based, managerial, and structural approaches to governance cannot meet. Historical redress, ideological contestation, global anti-DEI currents, and the legacies of cooperative governance arrangements that too often operate symbolically have exposed the limits of prevailing frameworks. This paper advances a conceptual contribution to governance theory by integrating three frameworks: Heracleous and Lan’s (2022) “Third Possibility,” which reframes the purpose of governance as stewardship grounded in socioemotional wealth, long-term legacy, and societal embeddedness; Complexity Theory, which supplies the orientation through which universities are understood as complex adaptive systems requiring adaptive rather than controlling governance; and the King V Code of Corporate Governance in South Africa, which provides the practice architecture through its apply-and-explain regime and outcomes-based logic. Held together, these frameworks combine to produce a reframing of governance as social relations work: the ongoing, relational enactment of authority, participation, and legitimacy within institutional life. The paper illustrates the integrated model across three governance domains – stewardship of institutional culture and symbolic life, cooperative governance architecture, and the role of the state – and engages the barriers such reform must confront. It translates the model into four interlinked recommendations: a national governance charter, complexity-informed leadership development, socioemotional wealth mapping, and metrics that measure influence rather than representation. Although South Africa is the empirical setting, the integrated model travels, offering scholars and practitioners a vocabulary for rethinking governance in public institutions facing volatility, politicisation, and crises of legitimacy worldwide.
