The emergent terrains of ‘higher education regionalism’: how and why higher education is an interesting case for comparative regionalism

ABSTRACT

The introduction of regional political initiatives in the higher education sector symbolizes one of the many aspects of the changing global higher education landscape. Remarkably, these processes have generally escaped comparative scrutiny by scholars researching higher education policy cooperation or regional integration. In this article, we demonstrate how and why higher education policy cooperation is an interesting case to study through the lens of comparative regionalism. To do so, we describe the emerging debate on comparative regionalism in EU studies. We explain what has led to this call to broaden analytical perspectives in examining regional integration and how it may be useful for scholars working in the higher education field to engage with this new research direction. In setting out this research agenda, we also spotlight the difficulties in operationalizing comparative regionalism for higher education studies and suggest ways forward.

KEYWORDS:

• Comparative regionalism
• EU studies
• higher education
• higher education regionalism
• internationalization
• regionalization

Acknowledgment

We are thankful for the support from the Ministry of Education of Singapore (AcRF Tier 1), the Institut Français de Singapour, and NTU Singapore (Merlion) to undertake this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Meng-Hsuan Chou (PhD, University of Cambridge) is Nanyang Assistant Professor in public policy and global affairs at NTU Singapore. Her research interests lie at the intersection of public policy, regionalism, and international relations. Hsuan’s publications have appeared in the Journal of European Public Policy, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Journal of Contemporary European Research. She is the co-editor of Building the Knowledge Economy in Europe: New Constellations in European Research and Higher Education Governance (with Åse Gornitzka, 2014, Edward Elgar) and The Transnational Politics of Higher Education: Contesting the Global/Transforming the Local (with Isaac Kamola and Tamson Pietsch, 2016, Routledge).

Pauline Ravinet (PhD, Sciences Po Paris) is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the Lille Centre for European Research on Administration Politics and Society, Université de Lille 2. Her research focuses on the emergence and governance of the EHEA, and, more generally, European public policies. Her doctoral thesis on the genesis and institutionalization of the Bologna Process (2007) won the Prize for best PhD in Political Science (category Public Policy) of the Association Française de Science politique. Pauline is the co-editor of the best-selling Dictionnaire des politiques publiques (2004, 2006, 2010, translated into Spanish, Romanian, Russian, and Chinese), and authored articles and chapters on the Bologna Process in different refereed journals and edited books.

ORCiD

Meng-Hsuan Chou http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8138-236X

Notes

1. We use the phrases ‘EU studies’ and ‘European integration studies’ interchangeably to refer to the complex regional formation processes occurring in Europe since the 1950s. This set of literature is extremely sophisticated and the subject-specific debate between EU and European integration may be of less interest to this audience. We chose to use the phrases interchangeably to facilitate discussions relevant to the readers of this journal; our decision to do so should not be construed to imply the lack of complexity in this debate.

2. The transformative changes sweeping through the higher education sector in recent decades are well documented and debated in many posts and articles on the Globalhighered blog, University World News website, and the Times Higher Education.

3. Indeed, the very presence of this journal confirms the robustness of this area of research.

4. For students of institutionalist theory, this shift from old to new is recognisable. For example, new institutionalists argue that an institution is not merely the formal rules and regulations that delineate structural operations, it includes formal and informal rules that shape and animate actor behaviour and ensuing interactions and outcomes.

5. This focus allows us to tackle questions concerning statehood from an international perspective rather than a narrower geographically confined continental viewpoint. We acknowledge, however, that the role of sub-national regions in higher education policy developments is interesting and insights from this strand of literature could be integrated with findings from research following our proposed agenda (cf. Klemenčič 2016).

6. While this distinction between regionalism and regionalisation seems commonplace in the political science literature, higher education scholars have been seen to adopt a different position concerning these terms. For example, Knight (2012) argues that the suffix ‘ism’ refers more to an ideology or a set of beliefs, whereas ‘regionalization’ is used to mean the ‘intentionally building connection and relations among higher education actors and systems in a region’. Because we are not focussed on the increasing social relation between higher education actors in the region, we embrace ‘regionalism’ in the mainstream political science literature – the political project in ‘building a region’.

7. The question concerning whether mobile students in Europe feel more ‘European’ has been extensively explored in socio-political studies of the Erasmus programme (see Sigalas 2010; Mitchell 2015). We note there exists initial data measuring regional identity of students in Asia along the same line (Knight 2012, 24), but systematic comparisons are still wanting.

8. For example, we see the phenomenon of intra-regional mobility in Africa as truly fascinating because the level of student mobility is impressive: 1 out of 16 Sub-Saharan students has gone abroad for their education, with the majority of students remaining within the continent (Hoosen, Butcher, and Njenga 2009, 13). These developments raise questions concerning whether existing mobility is a pre-condition for political projects of region-creation, or if it is an outcome from these very projects.

9. See for instance the chapter on ‘Europe’s Bologna process and its impact on global higher education’ in the SAGE Handbook of International Higher Education, where higher education regional initiatives in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the United States are presented as ‘responses [to the Bologna Process] from other regions’, and characterised as ‘Bologna-type’ initiatives (Huisman et al. 2012). In such works, not only is the perspective highly Eurocentric, but also the mechanisms of influence/mimetism/circulation of the Bologna Process are imprecisely documented. In order to have meaningful insights into regional higher education developments around the world, we argue that it is essential to abandon such blunt assumptions about the significance of European developments. It is far more useful to focus on parsing out the multiple rationales behind regional initiatives through a strong comparative research design.

10. See Chou and Ravinet (2015, 365–366) for an extended comment on Knight’s approach.

11. Our use of the phrase ‘EU scholars’ refers to those studying EU and European integration and not to their nationality.

12. See Saurugger (2013) and Börzel (2011) for an overview of this evolution in regional integration studies.

13. Saurugger (2013) provides a clear presentation of the relative position of European studies within the first theories of regional integration (see 41–65 in Chapter 1).

14. We note another dominant strand from the field of international political economy, which focuses on economic regionalism (i.e. drivers of regional trade, design of regional institutions for sustaining liberalisation, and settling disputes) (see Mansfield and Reinhardt 2003). We do not elaborate this approach because we are more interested in higher education regionalism and less on economic regionalism. That said, we do acknowledge the potential for exchange between our agenda with that of international political economy.