Governance-Aware Generative AI Literacy for Adult Higher Education

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is becoming routine in university study, yet institutional responses often separate technical fluency, academic integrity, and responsible governance. This integrative conceptual synthesis develops governance-aware GenAI literacy for adult higher education. A bounded, purposive review of 28 sources published through 10 September 2026 combined peer-reviewed studies, foundational scholarship, policy frameworks, and one preprint. Sources were coded for learning capability, epistemic risk, pedagogical mechanism, governance requirement, and strength of evidence. The resulting framework comprises five connected domains: epistemic verification, task and interaction specification, dialogic reflection, ethical governance, and transfer to professional action, all centred on visible human accountability. The framework extends beyond text prompting to multimodal, personalised, and agentic systems. It is translated into a pilot-ready eight-week sequence, tiered workload model, assessment evidence, accessibility safeguards, disciplinary adaptations, and an evaluation protocol. The paper does not claim empirical validation of the model or optimality of the sequence. Instead, it offers a bounded design proposition for testing. Governance-aware literacy is presented as the capacity to use AI productively while documenting, verifying, contesting, and justifying its contribution in academic and professional contexts.