Soft privatisation: mapping an emerging field of European education governance

ABSTRACT

This paper introduces the concept of ‘soft privatisation’. Departing from a review of the literature examining the growing participation of private sector actors in the provision of public education across Europe, the paper investigates how privatisation has emerged in the context of the European Union as a phenomenon embedded in, rather than a replacement of, public education. Through analysing the creation of a European education area – and the move of European education from being a driver for economic growth to becoming an Economy in itself – the paper argues that privatisation in Europe is deeply imbricated with the network modes of public education governance characteristic of the European Union and the Bologna Process. These entanglements have implications both for the transparency and political accountability of private sector actors involved in public education.

KEYWORDS:

• Soft privatisation
• European education
• EU
• soft network governance
• public education
• commercialisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The fact that the Bologna ambitions were born as part of a larger EU agenda is also reflected in the memorandum from the European Commission under Jacques Delors in 1991 on Higher Education in Europe. The memorandum shows that higher education had become part of the European Community’s ‘broader agenda on economic and social coherence’ (Huisman and Van der Wende 2004, 350). The memorandum was embedded in the Commission’s ambition to ensure that higher education was designed to accommodate the economic needs of Europe and help the internal market to function (Brøgger 2016, 2019; European Commission 1991).