Comparing Higher Education Governance Systems in Four European Countries

Since the 1990s, “new governance” has been at the forefront of discussions on governance in higher education and elsewhere. “Less government and more governance” has become the widely shared credo (Frederickson 1999:705). Supported by neo-liberal ideologies, authorities and powers have been redistributed across the various levels of higher education sys-tems. In many European countries, coordination has changed from a clas-sical form of regulation by one actor, the state, to forms in which various actors at various system levels coordinate the system (“multi-level multi-actor governance”). Coordination increasingly takes place through inter-connected policy levels, ranging from the local to the global level, with a substantial number of actors who in networks of interdependent relation-ships influence agenda setting, policy development, policy determination, policy implementation and evaluation (de Boer 2006). Generally speaking, we witness the blend of various forms of governance, in which elements of traditional governance, with a key role of the state, self-governance, havinga long tradition in higher education, and network governance are present. In this chapter, we will take a more differentiated and analytical view on governance in four university systems. We will compare changes of university governance in England, the Netherlands, Austria and Germany over the last two decades. For this purpose, we have established what we call the “governance equalizer”. After a brief introduction on governance, this analytical tool is presented in the first part of this chapter. The second

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