What does knowledge management in public administrations look like in practice?

The need for effective and targeted knowledge management in the public sector is growing in response to complex challenges, impending retirement waves, and digital transformation. However, knowledge management is often treated as a buzzword, without really understanding its scope. This paper clarifies what knowledge management looks like in practice by analysing over a hundred case studies and deriving empirically grounded criteria that define KM in the public sector. These case studies, drawn from academic literature and online publications, span a wide range of countries and institutions, giving the derived criteria a certain degree of universal relevance. The analysis reveals that KM intersects with various fields of institutional management, such as human resources and information technology. While the identified criteria specify what constitutes knowledge management, they remain general enough to allow flexible adaptation to different institutional and cultural contexts.