Higher Education Governance

Abstract

The governance of higher education has been a prominent topic for investigation at least since Burton Clark’s foundational 1983 study on the higher education system (see *General Overview and Historical Studies*). While there is no universally agreed definition of governance in general or governance in the area of higher education, there are certain characteristics of it that are common to most if not all definitions. First, governance relates to decision-making processes and structures, many of which draw on long-standing historical regulatory models. In Europe and higher education systems influenced by Europe, these include, for example, the Humboldtian tradition of academic self-rule and the Napoleonic state-centered tradition, as well as the AngloSaxon model of stronger market-oriented regulation. The structures and decision-making processes inherent in higher education governance also generally entail multiple actors with often diverging interests and especially in higher education regularly take place in a multilevel environment with diverse stakeholders This also relates to the second point, namely that higher education governance addresses supranational, national, regional as well as institutional processes; studies in this area can either focus on one of these levels or cut across several of them. Third, while higher education governance has some sector-specific characteristics it also shares many developments with general public sector governance. This is reflected in the fact that many conceptual approaches used for the study of higher education governance are imported from political science, public administration, public policy, or organizational studies. Finally, higher education governance also has intersections with other research fields, including, for example, higher education policy studies and studies on the political economy or the financing of higher education. As governance tools become more diverse, and since governance arrangements and dynamics are inherently political, it is hard to completely isolate this topic for the purpose of this bibliography. Therefore, a certain overlap or complementarity with other bibliographies, such as the one on higher education policy by William R. Doyle (2011), are inevitable. Our selection of themes is largely pragmatic and aims to cover all crucial dimensions and major themes of higher education governance addressed in academic research. We structure the bibliography along twelve sections starting from more general and conceptual analyses. For the sake of transparency and clarity we focus next on different levels of higher education governance: (1) system-level governance i.e., state steering of higher education, (2) institutional governance, i.e. university-level administration, and (3) international and multilevel governance. We then address studies on key modern-day issues in higher education governance such as accountability, autonomy, and quality assurance, before presenting a series of theoretically guided analyses on contemporary reform processes. The following segments are then dedicated to the linkages between higher education and the political economy, welfare state, and a diverse array of interest groups. In the end we address developments in specific regions of the world as well as higher education governance in federalist political systems.