European neighbourhood policy, the Bologna model and EU-Egyptian cooperation in Higher Education

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the EU’s neighbourhood policy towards Egypt. Using the higher education sector as a case, it explores the EU’s policy to induce reforms through governance transfers and Egypt’s response to this offer. The main questions are: (1) To what extent do EU policy objectives and governance approaches influence the reform of higher education in Egypt? (2) Which factors facilitate or hinder the reform process at various levels of intervention? Theoretically, the research draws on concepts of EU policy and governance transfers to partner states and the significance of contextual factors for reforms within these states. Methodologically, the analysis applies a qualitative approach based on official documents and semi-structured expert interviews with European and Egyptian officials. The analysis suggests that factors on both sides of the cooperation contribute to limiting policy implementation: the overly complex and rather unspecified governance concepts of the EU and the difficulties in Egypt to implement policies through decentralized action.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• Egypt
• Euro-mediterranean partnership
• bologna process
• EU governance transfer
• higher education reform in Egypt

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the German Academic Exchange Service for a grant in the framework of the programme: Bilateral Exchange of Scientists, 2018 (grant nr. 57388999). The authors would like to thank Henriette Müller and three anonymous reviewers of Mediterranean Politics for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2023.2291741.

Notes

1. All official documents are cited in the online Annex 1.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the DAAD Bilateral exchange of scientists [2018 (57388999)].