Government Continues to Do Its Job. A Comparative Study of Governance Shifts in the Higher Education Sector

Abstract

Governance in higher education has undergone certain substantial shifts in recent decades. In order to analyse this process from an empirical point of view, a specific understanding of governance, based on the role of the public power in question (state, government or another such power, depending on the context) has been assumed. Changes in systemic governance (and consequently also at the institutional level) are a product in particular of governments' responses to changes in their respective environments. This theoretical assumption, which in this particular study takes the form of a specific typology of governance modes, is employed to analyse those changes witnessed in higher education over the last 20 years. It does this by focusing on four specific national cases (England, Germany, Italy and The Netherlands). The empirical evidence shows that government continues to govern, and has not lost any of its policy-making power, but has simply changed the way it steers higher education.

How policy instruments are chosen: patterns of decision makers’ choices

“…External legitimation means that a policy tool is perceived as fitting sectoral policy needs due to the high reputation enjoyed by its source. Examples of this include: the process of diffusion of NPM tools (Ongaro 2010;Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011); school autonomy (Martens et al 2010); institutional assessment in higher education (Huisman 2009;Capano 2011); anti-smoking policy (Cairney et al 2011); deliberative democracy in urban planning (Kahane et al 2010;Kersting et al 2016); and liberal economic policies (Simmons and Elkins 2004).…”

Bringing Governments Back in: Governance and Governing in Comparative Policy Analysis

“…It is a core determinant and element of governance, rather than something existing in opposition to, or outside of, governance. Government has the inescapable task of defining what governance is, or can be (Capano 2011), and may choose to allow a higher degree of freedom to other policy actors with regard to the goals to be pursued and the means to be employed.…”

Nuevas Formas De Gobernanza en La Educación Superior Latinoamericana. Los Casos De Chile, Argentina Y Méxi

“…For many we are basically dealing with a mixture of a substantial loss in the capacity of the government to control HES, with an increasing participation of new actors in the policy arena. By contrast Capano (2011Capano ( : 1625 states that the interpretation problem lies in thinking that government and governance are two poles of a sole continuum, whose gradation would imply multiple forms of governing and coordinating the process of policy elaboration. Instead, we are talking about two different concepts, founded on two substantially different assumptions: while "Governance refers to the possible ways in which policy actors combine to solve collective problems and thus to the ways in which the policy-making process is steered.…”

“…According to several authors (Geiger, 2004;Capano, 2011;Casanova, 2013), the HE reform in Europe was favored mainly by the financial crisis of the Welfare State; the growing importance of highly qualified human capital, as well as the complex process of conformation of the European Higher Education Area. The main modifications which have shaped the new configuration of European HESs have passed through the concession of a greater institutional administration on the government part, as well as the promotion of changes in the internal administration of the HEIs; the diversification of funding sources, and the ex-post evaluation of the quality of teaching and research (Capano, ibid: 1624(Capano, ibid: -1625Magalhaes and Amaral, 2009).…”

“…On one hand, after the display of the Structural Adjustment policies promoted by the Washington Consensus, it is clear that markets (or market behaviors) are not phenomena which stem out of nature, or a spontaneous point of view, consists precisely on making universities behave as institutions, since that is a mandatory prerequisite to ensure that the HES as a whole, responds effectively to the needs of society and the public interest (Capano, 2011). Proceeding this way, not only rescales the question about the real weight of the actors involved in this decision-making process (whether they are traditional stakeholders or not) but also, in the light of the experience of the last decades, it is possible to analyze the redefinition of what is now understood as the "needs of society" and "public interest" or, in other words, which is the function of higher education and what role does it play in the face of society and economical development?…”