Book excerpt: This book explores school processes that shape student learning and principals’ leadership. It uses an interdisciplinary approach by applying the complexity governance and leadership theories drawn from public administration and leadership discourse in education. The strength of this book lies in identifying the latent processes that determine governance and leadership using interaction, inter-relatedness and interdependence through explanation building used in advanced qualitative analysis which hitherto rarely used in education. For this purpose, it first draws organised data developed as leadership function-behaviour interaction in the book School leadership in India: Styles, functions, behaviours and practices written by the same author and published by Routledge in 2025. Another important feature of the volume is how it applies robust theories drawing from public administration and educational leadership using an interdisciplinary approach that was rare to find in studying school governance and leadership. This book will be of interest to researchers, academicians working in the area of educational leadership and management, school and teacher education in universities, research institutes, think-tanks working on education policy, good governance and public policy in general. It is also relevant in management institutes, public administration, development studies and public policy in universities.