A foremost goal toward sustainable energy is decentralizing its production and management. To achieve this, actors in peripheral contexts must be capacitated with novel competencies. Energy, however, remains a highly centralized field particularly in training its workforce. We explore in this paper tensions in producing a specialized track on energy policy for a professional master's program in public management as part of a European Union-funded project. Set in the Philippines, a developing archipelagic country still in the midst of creating an interconnected national grid, we present our experience in developing a curriculum that tends toward a decentralized mode in energy systems while still accommodating the dominant centralized configuration. We show how we considered stakeholder needs, backgrounds of prospective students, and the general competencies that graduates need to deploy in both central and peripheral contexts. The paper documents a case where curricular flexibility, expressed in matching required and optional elective courses according to student characteristics and goals, could respond to notions of energy citizenship in training public managers.