Reconstructing Waqf Governance: Institutional Accountability and Sustainable Development in Muslim Societies

Abstract

Contemporary waqf governance has expanded through statutory regulation, institutional reform, professional management, and financial oversight, yet accountability remains fragmented across the institutions responsible for administering endowed assets. Existing scholarship has examined legal compliance, financial accountability, managerial performance, and stakeholder responsibility largely as distinct governance concerns, leaving insufficient conceptual integration of these functions within an institutional legal architecture. The study reconstructs waqf governance through an Integrated Institutional Accountability Framework (IIAF) developed from normative legal research, doctrinal analysis, comparative institutional examination, and conceptual synthesis of contemporary scholarship. Comparative analysis of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Türkiye reveals that differences in statutory authority, trusteeship, administrative control, and supervisory arrangements generate distinct accountability configurations without fully connecting institutional authority to responsibility, verification, stakeholder scrutiny, and social outcomes. The IIAF integrates six dimensions (legal, Sharīʿah, administrative, financial, stakeholder, and developmental accountability) within a layered architecture linking institutional authority, responsible action, verification, public scrutiny, and sustainable benefit. Its principal contribution lies not in identifying separate forms of accountability, but in explaining their institutional interdependence as a condition of legitimate and sustainable waqf governance. The framework consequently extends Islamic legal scholarship beyond doctrinal analysis toward an institutional account of how normative authority is organised, exercised, monitored, and translated into public benefit. Its wider application to zakat, baitul māl, Islamic charitable foundations, and other Islamic legal institutions provides a basis for comparative inquiry rather than an assumed universal model.