Latest Blog Posts

After being in the back front of higher education policy making for a good decade – between 80s and 90s of the past century (Corbett, 2006, 2011), the European Commission got a new opportunity to establish itself as an influential actor in the European higher education sector[i]. And it managed to do so quickly and […]

The Bologna Process, inspired by the development of the Europe of Knowledge, has been an example for world regions[i]. The policy implementation experiences from the Bologna Process have been simulated by world regions that value higher education cooperation across countries. Across regions the degree of integration in higher education varies along the policy process from […]

An important aim of the European Research Area (ERA) is to facilitate the voluntary coordination among national research funding agencies. While most of the research funding is allocated nationally, the ERA encourages national research funding bodies to set up joint trans-national calls to fund European research networks. Since the launch of ERA in 2000, a number […]

The way the European Union regards science and research is changing. There is an increased emphasis on producing marketable deliverables for financial gain. At the same time, the advent of Horizon 2020 raises important yet often-overlooked questions. Where is it exactly that European research policy is heading? And is this in line with where it […]

An enduring tension in systemic integration in public sector governance has featured the relations between state and its agencies and organizations devoted to specific tasks. Thus periods of greater leeway to sub-systemic organizational autonomy have intertwined with periods of contraction and stronger central control, and vice versa. A recent example is the wave of so-called […]

Labour market shortages in high-skilled sectors, demographic changes and the constant pressure to innovate have prompted governments around the world to engage in a global competition for talent. Against this context, the regional dimension has become increasingly important as governments seek to activate all policy instruments in the race for the ‘best and brightest’. This […]

At the end of the second millennium, the European Union (EU) boldly proclaimed that within a decade it aimed to become the ‘most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’. This ambition and its renewal through the Europe 2020 Strategy have seemingly been forgotten and, indeed, neglected amidst the Crisis. To what extent has […]