Beginning in the year 2000, higher education policies all over Europe were transformed by the launching and evolution of the Bologna Process, otherwise known as the process of creating a European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Initially, this process was flexible and informal, which makes the rapidity and scope of the changes it brought about surprising: why did European governments commit themselves to achieving the Bologna Objectives, and why so quickly, when there was no legal obligation to do so? I will argue the following: to understand the development of such a sense of obligation, we must take into account the special interests at stake when Bologna objectives are implemented at a national level. We must also consider the legitimacy lent to the process by the Bologna ideals of a knowledge‐based economy and society. These elements are present in other studies on this topic. However, and this is rarely considered, we also have to take into account the specific dynamics of the process of creating an institutional coordination and monitoring mechanism. This mechanism has a formal institutional structure and tools for evaluation and monitoring. Our analysis of the way in which it was developed and formalised enriches previous research on the topic and also sheds light on how a flexible European process of voluntary participation became a monitored system of coordinated national higher education policies.

The field of policy studies has always been interested in analyzing and improving the sets of policy tools adopted by governments to correct policy problems, and better understanding and improving processes of policy analysis and policy formulation in order to do so. Past studies have helped clarify the role of historical processes, policy capacities and design intentions in affecting policy formulation processes, and more recently in understanding how the bundling of multiple policy elements together to meet policy goals can be better understood and done. While this work has progressed, however, the discussion of what goals policy designs should serve remains disjointed. Here it is argued that a central goal, in fact, 'the' central goal, of policy design is effectiveness. Effectiveness serves as the basic goal of any design, upon which is built other goals such as efficiency or equity.

This thematic issue introduces the multifaceted nature of contemporary public policy-its multi-level, multi-actor and multiissue features-using the case of higher education policies from around the world. To do so, this introduction first describes how higher education as a policy sector should be garnering far more attention from scholars interested in political, economic and social transformation. A framework for identifying and accounting for how the 'multi-s' characteristics configure and re-configure public policy is then introduced. Next, this thematic issue's contributions are summarized with highlights of how they bring to life the different 'multi-s' features. This introduction concludes with a discussion of what the proposed framework of the 'multi-s' offers to studies of higher education policy coordination. In so doing, the objectives of this thematic issue are to highlight what the case of higher education policy coordination offers to studies of public policy and to initiate a dialogue between all social scientists and practitioners interested in the increased complexity of governing, producing and using knowledge today. This thematic issue of Policy and Society focuses on the increased multifaceted characteristic of contemporary public policy (Peters, 2015). Using the case of higher education policies from around the world, we highlight the multi-level, multi-actor and multi-issue-'multi-s'nature of public policy in areas of growing international and political attention. The global shift towards knowledge-based economies and societies has placed 'knowledge' at the core of contemporary public policy and policy-making. The governance of knowledge, however, is not a neatly contained policy coordination exercise: it requires collaboration across multiple policy sectors that may have previously experienced very little or less interaction. A non-exhaustive list of relevant policy areas includes higher education, research, trade, foreign policy, development and home affairs (migration). Higher education policy coordination is thus permeated with respective sectoral concerns, with discussions taking place across distinct policy arenas, sometimes in silo, both inside and

Regional cooperation in the higher education policy sector has been on the rise throughout the last decades. In this article, we compare and analyse two instances of higher education regionalisms (i.e. political projects of higher education region creation) in Europe and South-East Asia from an ideational perspective. In so doing, we engage with and challenge the diffusion argument common in both European higher education studies ('Bologna Process export thesis') and new comparative regionalism. Using publicly accessible documents from regional bodies active in higher education policy coordination, and 53 semi-structured interviews with key policy actors involved in these developments, we identify the policy ideas of European and South-East Asian higher education regionalisms, and consider whether the extant models of regional cooperation and the knowledge discourse affected their evolution. Our findings indicate that the 'Bologna Process export thesis' and the diffusion assumptions of comparative regionalism are too simplistic and misleading. We conclude with suggestions for scholars interested in new comparative regionalism.