Regulatory regionalism and education: the European Union in central Asia

Abstract

This paper investigates the purchase which Jayasuriya’s regulatory regionalism approach offers for an analysis of the European Union’s engagement in Central Asia. The European Union has a clearly articulated strategy through which to pursue what it sees as its interests in Central Asia and the development of a range of EU–Central Asia education initiatives has been given a role within this over‐arching strategy. In the first section of this paper, the core features of regulatory regionalism are identified and discussed. Then, the prospects for the EU–Central Asia strategy are discussed in relation to the extent to which the strategy exemplifies the aspirations of EU regulatory inter‐regionalism. In the second half of this paper, building on empirical research with EU and Central Asia policy actors, the EU–Central Asia education initiatives are used to explore the regulatory regional approach and to consider the extent to which it constitutes an adequate account of EU–Central Asia inter‐regionalism in the policy domain of education. The paper argues that the theory of regulatory regionalism captures something of the EU theory of its inter‐regionalism but that further theoretical and empirical work is needed in order to account for the limited traction which the education initiatives have been able to gain as part of the EU–Central Asia strategy.

Keywords:

• regulatory regionalism
• accountability communities
• European Union
• Central Asia
• EU–Central Asia education initiatives

Introduction

This paper investigates the purchase which a regulatory regionalism approach offers for an analysis of the European Union’s engagement in Central Asia. The European Union has a clearly articulated strategy through which to pursue what it sees as its interests in Central Asia and the development of a range of EU–Central Asia education initiatives has been given a role within this over‐arching strategy. In the first section of this paper, Jayasuriya’s specification of the contexts and processes of regional and inter‐regional engagement is discussed. The core features of regulatory regionalism are identified as (a) a shift from nation and state (government and legislation) to region and non‐state (governance and regulation); (b) the diffusion and acceptance of policy agendas, discourses and tools which are mobilised within new and autonomous regulatory institutions; (c) the development of accountability communities within which de‐politicised and technical solutions are sought for policy challenges; and (d) the incremental removal of policy domains, their challenges and policy levers, from their democratic and political context. At the same time, regulatory regionalism as developed by Jayasuriya has a set of caveats for investigating: the domestic political sources of promotion and contestation of regional and inter‐regional projects; the institutional contexts within which they develop; the production of hierarchies within what remain emergent and constructed regional formations; and the necessarily asymmetric dynamics both within and between regions. In the next section of this paper it is the latter set of features of regionalisation which are explored in relation to the EU and Central Asia. They are seen as fundamentally conditioning the context for the core features of regulatory regionalism, which can be seen as the embedded theory of the EU’s engagement with Central Asia. In the second half of this paper, the EU–Central Asia education initiatives are presented and discussed. The evidence presented there is suggestive in a number of ways. To date, the education initiatives have been over‐determined by the EU–Central Asia regional and inter‐regional contexts within which they have been defined and implemented. The rolling out of a regulatory regional governance approach for education has been stymied by the political and economic context of EU–Central Asia relations as a whole. In conclusion, the paper argues that the theory of regulatory regionalism through the development of accountability communities captures something of the EU theory of its inter‐regionalism, but that Jayasuriya’s equally important caveats about the conditions for regulatory regionalism help to explain the limited traction which the education initiatives have been able to gain. ¹

Regulatory regionalism

Jaysuriya’s work on regulatory regionalism provides a valuable set of conceptual tools for consideration of the dynamics of regionalisation and inter‐regionalism (Jayasuriya 2003, 2007, 2008a, 2008b). The approach has also been extended to try to account for the significance and effects of higher education policy in the EU and the wider Europe in relation to the Bologna Process (Jayasuriya 2009; Robertson 2009). Regulatory regionalism provides an insightful and necessary corrective to un‐nuanced and zero‐sum analyses of the production of governance arrangements by calling for a revisiting of the importance of formal regional institutions and a re‐recognition of what he terms the ‘domestic political mainsprings of regional governance’ (Jayasuriya 2003, 199). Jayasuriya emphasises the continuing importance of the play of national interests in the construction and mobilisation of the conditions (institutional, material, discursive and political) for the construction of regions and the potential for them to develop regulatory institutions and functions. At the same time as keeping the national political context firmly in the analytical frame, Jayasuriya’s approach has the virtue of paying attention to the links between political and economic actors in the production, promotion and implementation of projects for both regionalisation and regulation. In this sense, the capacity to regulate is fundamentally conditioned by the political and institutional processes and dynamics within regions and in their relations with other regions. The virtue of this approach is that it enables the success or failure of institutional design to be properly situated as what needs to be explained rather than it necessarily explaining anything in its own right.

In terms of the European Union, Jayasuriya wants to emphasise an underlying logic that for the constituent Member States of the EU, political autonomy (sovereignty) is maintained and reinforced in key areas by conceding it in others, but that this emergent transfer creates conditions for transformations which impact both nationally and at the European level in the processes of governance. There is a logic of nation state engagement in a supra‐national political, economic and cultural regional formation, but nonetheless, regional projects establish dynamics which produce the conditions for heterarchic regulation between nation states (Brenner 2004), hierarchic regulation from a regional level down to the level of Member States, as well as shadow hierarchies (Jessop 2004). Such hierarchies are formed on the bases of differential political, economic and social power and capacity.

In addressing questions of inter‐regionalism, the specification of the logics and dynamics sketched above is supplemented by a recognition of the diversity of projects to construct regions and the necessarily differential content and process of inter‐regional engagement. This is particularly important when, as is the case in this paper, the manifold asymmetries which the EU and the Central Asia states display, are likely to condition both the production of a Central Asian space as a region and the terms of inter‐regionalism. For Jayasuriya, regionalisation and inter‐regionalism:

… will prove difficult in a region where there is scant evidence of a history of policy co‐ordination and, moreover, where levels of economic development and the organisation of financial systems differ considerably. (Jayasuriya 2003, 210)

This set of a priori positions and strictures with regard to the conditions for regulation to develop and be conditioned regionally and inter‐regionally, is supplemented in regulatory regionalism by a concern to account for the forms of governance which are enabled and constrained by regional and inter‐regional projects. In common with theorists such as David Harvey (2005), Jayasuriya draws attention to the shift from government and legislation to governance and regulation as evidenced by the following features of contemporary policy activity: ²

•	The separation of the locus of policy formation and policy implementation.
•	The establishment of new and autonomous regulatory institutions which are state‐like but distanced from state political processes.
•	The rise to prominence of political and economic actors who, while not engaged in the implementation of regulation, are central to the development of the content of regulation and the shaping of the context within which the new and autonomous regulatory institutions operate. 3
•	The establishment of rules which preclude the scope for discretionary (for which read political or democratic) intervention.

Jayasuriya’s discussion of the development of the Bologna Process for the construction of the European Higher Education Area (Jayasuriya 2009) constitutes a case study of the application of a regulatory regionalism approach to the construction of an extra‐EU region and the governance content which has promoted it. The Bologna Process inter alia produces a space of regulation which: (a) extends beyond the boundaries of the EU; (b) consists of flexible and informal modules of regulation; (c) enables different national responses in terms of their own systems of higher education; and (d) while regulating, simultaneously promotes the conditions for a competitive market in higher education services. Jayasuriya’s account of the Bologna Process is congruent with accounts of the EU regional governance approach, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), which has become the established governance mode for the construction of EU regional policy in policy domains which are outside the EU’s treaty base (Pochet 2001; Barbier 2004; Borras and Greve 2004; Goetschy 2004). Modularity, informality and flexibility are the hall‐marks of the EU’s internal regionalism and constitute a model for inter‐regional governance which is both recognised and mobilised by the EU institutions. The Bologna Process provides a powerful example of the potential for such an approach to have real and dramatic consequences for regional projects and specific policy domains. Indeed the Bologna Process has set in train the most dramatic upheavals in higher education since the events of 1968 (Nyborg 2004) and it has done so largely by coordinated governmental fiat on the basis of agreement by countries with highly diverse higher education systems. In seeking to account for this, Jayasuriya draws on the notion of accountability communities.

In Jayasuriya’s terms, accountability communities are:

… complex, and composed of public and/or private organisations endowed with capacities to perform legislative, monitoring and compliance activities in specific functionally based regulatory regimes within, and beyond, national boundaries. (Jayasuriya 2009, 6)

The Bologna Process would be seen as both the outcome and context for an accountability community of EU and extra‐EU policy actors engaged in the production of both a regional higher education policy and a region: the European Higher Education Area. What Jayasuriya argues for, is the importance of accountability in determining the effects of a policy community which is both topic‐focused (higher education) and integral to a regionalisation process. For Jaysuriya, accountability and its consequences are predicated on a set of features:

•	The development of shared epistemic resources (benchmarks, targets and shared discourses) which would both create legitimacy and pressures towards convergence within the accountability community. The development of shared epistemic resources creates the conditions for scrutiny and therefore accountability through developing and promoting a shared notion of outcome (quality, efficiency, equity and so on) which is then pursued by internal and external review, assessment and evaluation.
•	The diffusion and enforcement of core discourses (globalisation as threat; regionalisation as response to challenge of competition and motivation for cooperation; the knowledge‐based economy as social, cultural, political and economic development vision with related implications for higher education and research).
•	Reconfiguration of the role of nation, state and territory in the governance of higher education (organisations engaged are transnational, operate under new forms of bureaucratisation, and have developing connections with, between and in tension with existing levels and institutions of governance). 4
•	The stitching together of institutional, subnational and national levels of governance, of state and non‐state actors, of supranational, international and transnational actors and institutions to create new levels and hierarchies of governance. 5
•	A shift to de‐politicisation and emphasis on the technical through a focus on functional and task‐specific activities keeping the question of political choice in the background. Accountability in this sense is bracketed from broader political and social contestation and derives from the measurement of outcomes rather than consideration of the significance or legitimacy of what is being measured. 6 De‐politicisation is a strategic move since the political and social contradictions and dilemmas of policy can only ever be bracketed or elided rather than transcended. Nonetheless, the strategy of de‐policitisation does function to obscure the question of the locus of viability (Dale 1999) for policy and mystify the governance level at which those who are affected by policy shifts can seek redress or hold policy actors to account (Jayasuriya 2008a).
•	The emphasis on flexible rather than fixed participation and policy content creates opportunities for agenda amplification and asymmetric capacity for influence by participants. 7 The formation of boundaries of inclusion and exclusion for legitimate participation is inherently political and subject to the strategic interests of participants as bearers of interests.

In summary then, the conceptual apparatus of regulatory regionalism and its development of the tools to understand the significance, activities and outcomes of accountability communities, provide a wide‐ranging analytical repertoire for investigating regional and inter‐regional policy development. However, and as discussed below in relation to the EU–Central Asia case, the challenge now is to explore the value of this approach in particular contexts.

The EU and Central Asia

In this section of the paper, the potential for EU regulatory regionalist policy dynamics to both contribute to the construction of a region in the Central Asia space and influence the regulation of that region is discussed. The intention is to try to capture the degree to which accountability communities can be constructed and promoted and in relation to what kinds of contestation and strategic contradiction. In particular, the challenges which are addressed are the twin ontological predicates of regulatory regionalism as discussed above: the play of extant national interests and the traction which inter‐regional approaches can gain in contexts where there is little experience or commitment to a regional identity conducive to regional regulation.

In 2007, the EU and five states of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) agreed to work together on an inter‐regional basis. The document which constitutes the agreed positions on the work to be involved is: The EU and Central Asia: Strategy for a new partnership (Council of the European Union 2007a). The significance of this shift is not primarily in terms of the EU and Central Asia developing their relations; the EU has engaged with the Central Asian states both bilaterally and with a sense of the shared context for the countries since 1991. Rather what is significant is that for the first time, there is an agreement to work cooperatively and in partnership inter‐regionally around a set of agreed and shared challenges and interests.

For the EU, the inter‐regional is the default position for external relations; it repeatedly constructs its external relationships on the basis of geographically contiguous regions and neighbourhoods. In doing so, it contributes to the establishment of regional organisations, institutions, forums for discussion and cooperation, etc.

For MacFarlane (2004), the EU’s external relations reflex is to address regions as containers of economic, social and political commonalities by absorbing them in EU economic, social and political processes and developing an external dimension to its internal policy development dynamics. This form of foreign relations has two characteristics: an internal EU sense of what it constitutes as a political, economic and social space and a view of what its own policy development can contribute in regions in terms of an EU assessment of them.

The EU sense of itself is as a successful model of political, economic and social integration conducive to political stability and prosperity (Council of the European Union 2007b). For the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barosso, the key to the EU’s external relations is its power of soft power: the ability of the EU to attract others by the success of its political, economic and social model and thereby to contribute to bringing about change in societies with which it engages (EUobserver 2008). The European Commission’s sense of this is that their regional partners use the European Union as a reference point for the political, economic and social transitions of their countries (European Commission 2007). In a more tangible sense, the EU of course has, in addition to norms and processes, a regional legal framework built upon Member State treaty commitments. The EU’s engagements with other regions combines the production of institutions for cooperation and dialogue with a rather harder edge of promoting and achieving a degree of legislative harmonisation with EU legal frameworks for trade, energy, transportation, justice and home affairs (Kempe 2007).

The EU assessment of Central Asia which provides the rationale for its engagement consists of a set of inter‐locking and mutually reinforcing security challenges (see Table 1). The authoritarian natures of the Central Asian states with their ongoing democratic transitions and problematic human rights records continue to constitute the EU’s sense of the kinds of regimes with which it will be engaging. Demographic pressures related to ongoing and intensive migration which de‐stabilises the age, gender and ethnic balances and make‐up of these societies, constitute a set of shared problems of development in the region, define the security interests which the EU has in the region and are the logic behind EU engagement in social policy in the region. In a context where social services are under severe strain, where poverty, unemployment and income disparities provide the context for political radicalisation, including in terms of radical Islam, the Central Asian populations are viewed as constituting a series of threats to the EU. These threats are most evident in what the EU sees as the problems in establishing the rule of law, with Central Asia seen as a space of transnational crime where leaky borders and complicity between public officials and politicians point to the interests of the EU in terms of legal and judicial frameworks and institutions.

Table 1. EU priorities for Central Asia.

Society	Values	Economics	Security
Demography and pressure on social services	Democratic transitions	Market‐oriented reforms	Weapons of mass destruction
Income disparity	Human rights obligations	Business and investment climates	Trans‐national crime
Poverty		Economic diversification	Border management
		Intra‐regional trade
		Accessing world markets
		Sustainable use of natural resources
Source: European Commission (2002).

In policy terms then, there is a logic to both the EU engagement in Central Asia and in developing engagement on an inter‐regional basis. Regulatory regionalism in this case would seek to build on the material and structural reasons why this space is a relatively coherent region. Levgold (2003) argues that the Central Asian states:

… remain elaborately, hopelessly, albeit reluctantly bound together. The bonds are not merely pipelines, energy grids, entwined defence industries, and bureaucratic links, but above all dependency on one another’s markets, external debt, diasporas and the mutual vulnerability of porous borders. (Levgold 2003, 4)

The bases of an inter‐regional project as far as the EU is concerned would be threefold: firstly that the EU has clearly definable interests in the region, secondly that it offers to the Central Asia states a range of resources (financial, institutional, ideational as well as successful regional experience in mobilising such resources) and thirdly, that the challenges facing the Central Asia states can more successfully be addressed because they have regional, rather than just national, dimensions.

Nonetheless, neither the EU nor Central Asia can be considered to be successfully achieved regional interlocutors yet. Despite the view of itself which the EU brings into this strategic relationship, its interests in Central Asia are neither seamless nor unproblematic. In addition to the security issues discussed above, it is the question of energy security which is the fundamental security which motivates EU engagement. Recognition of this has the consequence that EU interests in the region would be seen as filled with a tension between engaging with the region as a whole and engaging with those states which might play a role in helping the EU to achieve its energy ambitions. It is not at all clear that the space of Central Asia is the most appropriate way of framing these interests. With regard to oil and gas resources, it would be the Caspian Sea which would provide a more material sense of a region: the Caspian littoral states would be key here – Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Two of these countries – Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan – would constitute the central states in terms of EU interests with Turkmenistan in particular constituting the greatest prize (Kleveman 2003).

Whatever shared challenges the Central Asia states have, they are also diverse. There are differences in size of population: Uzbekistan (25 million) and Kazakhstan (15 million) are the most populous with Tajikistan (6 million), Turkmenistan (5 million) and Kyrgyzstan (4 million) considerably smaller. The countries have different histories of political, economic and indeed military engagement with each other and extra‐regionally. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have shared borders, cultures and languages. Uzbekistan has a history of seeking regional dominance and the status of a human rights pariah since the Andijon Massacre in 2005. Turkmenistan has lived through the baroque authoritarianism of the late President Niyazov and is only slowly re‐engaging with the outside world. The contrast between the current and potential resource riches of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan and the impoverished Tajikistan, still recovering from civil war, heavily donor‐dependent and with its 1200 km border with Afghanistan, helps to put into perspective the factors which would militate against a hasty recognition either that these countries face the same challenges or that their priorities and interests in addressing them would be commensurable.

Nonetheless, a regional and inter‐regional approach is what has been signed up to by the EU and Central Asia. Before focusing attention more closely on the dimensions of a regulatory regionalism for this engagement however, it is important to recognise that EU–Central Asia is not the only form of international relations on the agendas of the Central Asia states. Russia, China, the US, Japan, Iran and Turkey are also seeking to pursue their own interests both bilaterally and in an emergent Central Asia region (Swanstrom 2005; Fogarty 2006; Engdahl 2006; Bordonaro 2007). However, it is to the content, processes and emerging outcomes of the EU’s engagement with Central Asia and their implications for an analytical framework of regulatory regionalism that this paper now turns.

The 2007 strategy (Council of the European Union 2007a) puts a number of policy areas on the table which would constitute the core of the approach to establishing a set of accountability communities in a form of soft inter‐regionalism, building on what the EU considers to be its priorities: ‘Good governance, the rule of law, human rights, democratisation, education and training are key areas where the EU is willing to share experience and expertise’ (Council of the European Union 2007a, 2).

The EU has a commitment to the notion of how, by delineating specific policy topics and securing the agreement of the governments of the states of Central Asia to work cooperatively and collaboratively on policy options in relation to them, incremental regionalism and inter‐regionalism will develop on the basis of mutual confidence building and that this will result in increased security, stability and prosperity in the region (Council of the European Union 2006). As an additional component of this approach to region‐building however, the EU has an aspiration to increasingly involve levels of participation which can promote a bottom‐up, civil society or governance dimension. This conviction is expressed in terms of how:

It is often possible to build relationships between state institutions represented at expert level, civil society organisation and individuals across border. This in turn promotes a long‐term, bottom‐up improvement in regional cooperation. (Council of the European Union 2006, 8)

Clearly then, the achievement of a form of regulatory regionalism which works in ways which are congruent with a sense of accountability communities is part of the explicit strategy of the EU. The extent to which this is likely to develop and over what kind of time frame, becomes an important component of the exploration of the implementation of the EU–Central Asia strategy.

For Human Rights Watch (2007), the Central Asia strategy provided an opportunity precisely because of the interaction of the different policy domains which would establish both the means to proceed and a sufficiently widely shared sense of what is at stake to encourage participation beyond either window dressing or lip‐service:

Central Asian governments want and need EU engagement. They are wise enough to have balanced foreign policy and to balance their partnerships. Some countries, such as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are donor dependent and need EU financial support, directly and through international financial institutions. Others seek EU support for broader political aims, such as Kazakhstan’s aspirations to assume the chairmanship of the OSCE. (Human Rights Watch 2007)

The inter‐locking policy domains and interests at play could well be considered to constitute an opportunity for forms of accountability and regulation to develop within the strategy on the basis of a shared sense of inter‐locking interests (Mayer 2006). Nonetheless, and in relation to Jayasuriya’s emphasis on the necessary caveats which must be borne in mind, what the potential is for mutual interests and commitment to regional and inter‐regional activities to succeed in leading to institution‐building, the development of accountability communities, an emergent regional regulation and so on, become empirical questions.

The EU–Central Asia education initiatives

In the remainder of this paper, it is to the empirical investigation of one of the inter‐locking strands within the EU–Central Asia Strategy, the education initiatives, that attention turns. Given that the Bologna Process has been identified within regulatory regionalism (Jayasuriya in this issue; Robertson in this issue) as an important exemplar of the production of regional and extra‐regional regulation, the development of these education initiatives could be expected to correlate well with the dimensions of regulatory regionalism and the formation of accountability communities discussed above. However, while there is a basis for regional and regulatory activity, in common with the EU–Central Asia strategy as a whole, the education initiatives as they have developed, display a number of features: a formal agreement to norms and priorities for policy development but little sense of accountability communities being developed or rules of the game being altered.

There is a sense that education policies and systems in Central Asia face common challenges. For Silova et al. (2007), education in the Central Asia states is characterised by:

•	The ongoing implications of post‐Soviet transition.
•	The predominantly Muslim nature of the populations.
•	Demographic pressures with large proportions of the populations under 24 years of age (Kazakhstan – 47%; Kyrgyzstan – 55%; Turkmenistan – 58%; Uzbekistan – 59%; Tajikistan – 61%). 8
•	The ongoing dismantling of vocational routes through secondary education as inherited from the Soviet era in the context of a radically transformed labour market.
•	High numbers of early school leavers with significant gender and poverty dimensions to the timing of dropping out.
•	The collapse in funding for education with user‐fees the dominant policy response.
•	High levels of corruption at all levels of the education sector with particular impacts on processes for entry to higher education.

Education policy and systems in all of the Central Asia states therefore face considerable challenges, many of which are shared, and therefore the context clearly exists for a common and collaborative approach for dealing with them to develop. The education initiatives as specified in 2007 constituted a blue‐print for common activity. In terms of moving beyond the blue‐print, since 2007, development and implementation of the education initiatives are now specified in terms of (a) establishing an EU–Central Asia education platform; (b) specific activities; (c) information and communication actions (see Table 2). In the next section of this paper, drawing on research conducted in June 2009 with participants in developing the education initiatives, these three components are investigated through the lens of regulatory regionalism.

Table 2. The EU–Central Asia education initiatives.

EU–Central Asia education platform	Specific activities	Information and communication actions
High level meetings	TEMPUS	Joint events
Technical working groups	ERASMUS MUNDUS	Publish joint materials
National level dialogue	THE BOLOGNA PROCESS
	THE European Training Foundation (ETF)
	CAREN

The EU–Central Asia education platform

Despite the rather amorphous label of platform, this strand of the education initiatives is best understood as an attempt to establish the conditions for ongoing, iterative and productive policy dialogue and agreement within an accountability community.

What could be termed the programme theory (Pawson 2002) of the education platform is that networks of cooperation and dialogue consisting of both high level political discussion and more technical matters would develop and contribute to a regionalisation of education policy in Central Asia with the EU supporting the elaboration of its own policy agendas in the region. High level meetings would take place between the Commission and Ministerial representatives from the Central Asian countries, who would meet flexibly as a region and bilaterally. Technical working groups, chaired by each of the Central Asia countries, would have the mandate to review sectors of education, develop agreed policy responses and stimulate policy discussion at the national level. EU Member States would be involved as a resource to offer experience and expertise; the Commission would play a role in helping to coordinate Member State and EU resources. In addition, there would be national level dialogue between the Commission, interested EU Member States and individual Central Asia countries on a bilateral basis. The focus would be on: coordinating existing funding opportunities; developing work programmes and mechanisms for implementation and financing; and taking sector‐wide and holistic approaches to the elaboration of common, if flexibly applied, policy mixes.

A regulatory regionalism approach would seek to capture the dimensions of the innovation which an education platform would represent. It would for the first time set up a process whereby the governments of the Central Asian countries would meet together as a region and collaboratively, to discuss joint challenges and approaches. It would establish for the European Commission a role in coordinating policy discussion and development regionally and bilaterally and in developing a strategic approach to the activities of individual EU Member States in the Central Asian countries and regionally.

However, investigation of the practices involved in developing the education platform calls for considerable scepticism with regard to the programme theory of the education initiatives and their embedded regulatory regional approach.

By June 2009, three high level meetings had been held to flesh out and develop the components of the education initiatives and their coordination. The first meeting was in Cairo in May 2008 and it confirmed the commitment of the Central Asia states to education policy discussion through the education initiatives and was therefore the first step to establishing the education platform. Proposals were made to set up a regional network for coordinating arrangements for credit transfer (an implicit form of the technical working group) and to set up Central Asia environment and vocational training centres. The agreement to continue to participate in the education initiatives and indeed to contribute to the development of regional institutions was matched though by a developing fault line between a regional approach and a bilateral approach. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan favoured a regional approach; Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were concerned to maintain the potential for national‐ and project‐focused strategic initiatives. Commitment to ongoing participation did not mean that the regional had become the accepted lens through which to consider education reform.

The second meeting was convened in Brussels in September 2008. Again, this meeting confirmed the commitment of the Central Asia states to regional cooperation within the frame of the education initiatives, but at this point it remained the case that there was no timeline or methodology for implementation. Both the education platform and the broader education initiatives were still at the level of preparatory work. The questions of participation of which education policy actors and institutions, working within which processes, according to what work plan, with which timeframes and resources and so on, indeed all of the crucial factors in establishing a purposeful network of any sort and all central components of an elaborated accountability community, were still unanswered.

The third meeting was in Brussels in June 2009. There was satisfaction that the Central Asian countries were represented by quite high levels from Central Asian governments. ⁹ The willingness to consider the broad context of education reform and open up discussion beyond the initial priorities of higher education and vocational education was also commented upon. Nonetheless, satisfaction continued to be expressed in terms of the viability of the overall strategy and the potential for further progress rather than with regard to the hard work of implementation and work programmes where little progress was made. For some observers and participants, the education initiatives continued to be about defining the spaces for educational cooperation rather than about filling up what could appear to be empty boxes. This meeting did see the confirmation of the funding to be made available by the European Commission for the education platform: one million Euros for 2010 to fund the meetings which would constitute the education platform and coordinate activities in the other strands.

The details of this series of meetings suggest a number of features which have influenced the ways in which the education platform has developed and is likely to continue to develop and its salience for a regulatory regionalism approach. At each meeting, the existence of the initiative was restated but there was little development towards practical implementation. It is notoriously difficult to maintain momentum in network activities which depend on the presence of significant policy actors with real influence in their home countries. Not all countries were represented in the meetings and there was little continuity in the people participating. The lack of continuity made it difficult to make progress and from the perspective of education policy actors in the Central Asia states, the clarity and purpose of the education initiatives were far from being apparent.

Specific activities

This strand of the education initiatives can be seen as constituting the content and the material means which would contribute to the concrete implementation of whatever might emerge from the development of the education platform. In essence, the TEMPUS programme would provide the funding and procedures for education policy development activities, the Bologna Process a set of 10 policy areas for higher education reform and the Erasmus Mundus programme would provide the means to link together Central Asian higher education institutions, staff and students with those from EU Member States. The CAREN project would provide a high‐speed broadband network to link higher education and research institutions in Central Asia with the EU and globally. The activities of the European Training Foundation (ETF) would promote reform of the vocational education and training sector.

In essence then, the EU has attempted to roll‐out its existing agenda and processes for higher education into the Central Asia space and to re‐brand the extant approach as part of the EU–Central Asia education initiative. The agenda can be summarised as:

•	Increasing the attractiveness of EU higher education institutions for over‐seas, fee‐paying students.
•	Recruitment of talented over‐seas students by provision of scholarships, grants, etc. 10
•	Intensifying the links between the future elites of non‐EU countries and the EU inter alia by providing the means for such elites to receive higher education in EU universities. 11
•	The promotion of a European dimension to higher education curricula and participation by establishing ‘European’ courses offered jointly by consortia of universities leading to joint or double masters or doctorate degrees.

The European Union has two established road‐maps for higher education: the European Higher Education Area and the European Research Area. The mediator between these approaches is the Bologna Process, which sets out to establish readable and comparable degree structures based on a three‐cycle higher education architecture (bachelors, masters and doctorate), provision for mobility through credit transfer systems and quality assurance processes, breaking down the barriers to diversified and competitive higher education and research sectors and governance reform to increase the means for a wider range of stakeholders to be involved in the governance of the sectors (Tomusk 2004; Nyborg 2004; Smith 2005; Zgaga 2006). Embedded in the Bologna Process is a ratcheting up of the economic content of higher education in terms of provision of education as a tradable service, emphasising the economic efficiency and viability of the sectors within an approach to increasing diversification, whose motor will be a market competition for students and revenues.

In a sense then, the extension of EU higher education processes can be read against this script, in which case the Central Asia space would appear as an attractive additional source of a market for EU higher education and a resource for attracting brains into the EU research sector. Embedded in this would then be the opening up of the EU sectors for mobility, migration and fee‐paying students. A similarly realistic focus on interests would see the Central Asia states as willing participants in this agenda, since they would appear to represent a potential source of economic resources and political legitimacy by engagement in an attractive European model in addition to the implications of providing opportunities for actual or potential elites to benefit by participation in EU programmes. The additional factor is the potential for EU agendas and models to provide an apparently ready‐made and easy route to modernisation. Of course, in terms of an approach to regulatory regionalism, the core question would become the potential which processes such as the Bologna Process have to provide a transformative lever to open up the governance processes in the affected regions, including Central Asia. As Tomusk (1998) argues, the potential is that market‐based regulatory mechanisms will replace existing state‐controlled central planning, allocative and steering functions. EU and European higher education agendas have a significant socio‐economic content and potentially dramatic implications for the rules of the game of higher education governance: its mandate, governance and outcomes. But in practice, how do these agenda play out in the Central Asia space and in what ways are they mediated by the EU–Central Asia education initiatives?

TEMPUS

The TEMPUS (Trans‐European Mobility Scheme for University Studies) programme works on the basis of Joint European Projects (JEPs) between EU institutions and partners from third countries established as consortia. The JEPs run for two or three years and TEMPUS funding enables individuals working in the higher education sector to work with partners on specified activities within the project. TEMPUS is then clearly more than a mobility programme, rather it allows for policy‐specific and content‐rich education reform activities. TEMPUS has two other components: structural and complementary measures (SCMs – short term interventions to support national higher education reforms and strategic policy frameworks) and individual mobility grants (IMGs – funding training and conferences abroad and for EU teachers to deliver training in‐country).

The TEMPUS approach has developed through four iterations since 1990 (TEMPUS I ran from 1990–1994; TEMPUS II from 1994–1998; TEMPUS III from 2000–2006; and TEMPUS IV for the period 2007–2013). In theory TEMPUS is open to participation from a range of bodies in addition to higher education institutions (non‐governmental organisations, business companies, industries and public authorities) but in practice it has been a source of funding for universities engaged in government‐supported reform. It is essentially a bottom‐up programme relying on responses to calls for proposals from higher education institutions and their staff, but it is also directed towards the achievement of concrete political goals which are negotiated and agreed between the European Commission and the partner countries, but which follow the broad remit of reforming higher education aiming at a knowledge‐based society.

Since the launch of the Bologna Process (see below) in 1999, TEMPUS projects have been a means to develop Bologna principles and work towards their implementation even in countries which are not members of the Bologna Process. Kyrgyzstan has been particularly active in this regard with its involvement in the Commission‐funded Tuning Project through TEMPUS funding (www.tuning.unideusto.org). What has been apparent is the role TEMPUS projects have played in establishing particular institutions as pilots and flag‐ships for policy innovation. At the same time, the Central Asia region has made rather less progress in working through TEMPUS projects to develop effective, professional and transparent university management. Nonetheless, TEMPUS has a solid track record of activity in the region and both Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan have maintained their involvement in the programme despite otherwise problematic relations with the EU. Tajikistan has only been able to participate in TEMPUS programmes since 2004 and so there is the potential for even greater engagement there.

The bottom‐up profile of TEMPUS clearly has the potential to address quite embedded levels within the higher education sector. It provides opportunities for curricular development, enables institutions and academics working within them to gain prestige, contributes to internationalisation and provides benefits for students and staff. It remains the case though that it relies on the national context in order to have an impact at the systemic level, but this determining context should not obscure its potential to enable the EU to engage with quite embedded levels of education systems.

As part of the education initiatives, the EU has committed to double the funds available to Central Asia under the TEMPUS to an annual 10 million euro from 2010. TEMPUS officials on the ground in Central Asia have no doubt that there will be both the demand and the quality of applications to use this money. The TEMPUS programme’s strong track record in the region clearly gives the potential for this to be built upon within a more focused regional and bilateral approach. Kyrgyzstan provides a clear example of the extent of engagement in TEMPUS with the ways in which the JEPs have established pilot projects for the licensing of higher education institutions and participation of student organisations in quality assurance. Since 1994 there have been 36 major projects in Kyrgyzstan and the priorities of the Bologna Process have been reflected in projects which have been funded. There remains the potential then for TEMPUS to be a vehicle for more intense engagement in education reform in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. The mobilisation of TEMPUS within the education initiatives need not therefore be an exercise in continuity but can be further developed, and the doubling of funds, even though relatively small sums are involved, is not insignificant. There is no doubt on the ground that the doubling of TEMPUS money will be put to use in projects which concern higher education reform and the willingness is certainly there to apply for funding. Continuity is important and since 1990, the TEMPUS programme has established the means to build upon the infrastructures, good will, positive experiences and evidence of productive outcomes which are already in place.

In terms of whether the TEMPUS programme will display continuity or change within the education initiatives and whether its potential will be built upon, a number of initial assessments can be made. At the level of the EU institutions, TEMPUS has been subject to a number of modifications whose implications are yet to fully emerge. Historically, the priorities, projects and implementation of the TEMPUS programmes in Central Asia have been the responsibility of the European Commission’s Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) and the European Training Foundation (ETF). The money was always authorised and provided by the Directorate Generals for Foreign Relations (DG RELEX) and Aid/Development (DG AIDCO). The establishment of the Executive Agency in 2006 led to the shifting of the implementation of TEMPUS from the ETF but left policy decisions with the EAC between June 2008 and April 2009. From now on, it is to be AIDCO which takes responsibility for TEMPUS and for policy decisions taken with regard to it. It is also the case that it is AIDCO which has been tasked with the coordination of all of the education initiatives and so in one way the priorities, coordination and efficiency of both TEMPUS and the education initiatives may well be enhanced. However, these institutional arrangements do create some potential difficulties. One of the main successes of the TEMPUS programme and the reason why it constitutes a significant potential for the establishment of the education platform, is the long‐term engagement and experience in the region, which the ETF and DG EAC as institutions and the individual officials working within them have gained since 1990. TEMPUS as a bottom‐up programme is centrally concerned with the long‐term and iterative negotiation and implementation of project‐led reform by networks of actors with shared experience and a degree of trust which has developed over time. In contrast, AIDCO has limited knowledge and experience of education policy development in the region and its officials are not yet part of the networks in the countries.

It is important not to overemphasise the institutional politics and dynamics of the European Commission, but by June 2009 a number of concerns were being discussed internally. The question being asked was whether the shift to foreign relations and aid policy domains of an existing set of TEMPUS policy networks, was likely to undermine the production of more elaborated, meaningful and effective policy communities. The EU and Central Asia actors most closely involved in animating and directing the TEMPUS networks were no longer to be centrally involved in TEMPUS and its bottom‐up dynamic was being re‐contextualised by the broader strategic direction of the EU–Central Asia strategy. Rather counter‐intuitively, it seemed to some of the EU policy actors that the education initiatives were likely to prevent rather than enhance the production of accountability communities through the mobilisation of TEMPUS.

The Bologna Process

Since the signing of the Bologna Declaration in 1999 by Ministers of Education from 29 European countries, the process has grown to include 46 countries consisting of all but two of the signatories of the European Cultural Convention of the Council of Europe. ¹² Every two years since 1999, meetings of ministers of higher education have met to take stock of progress, agree to new priorities and arrange for an ongoing work programme within a clearly defined, iterative process involving all levels of higher education systems in a process which is defined as much by its governance arrangements as its content. ¹³

In terms of the content of higher education reform, the Bologna Process has incrementally developed additional action lines in addition to the original six established in Bologna. ¹⁴ The current action lines are to:

•	Establish a three‐cycle system of higher education within a qualifications framework.
•	Promote mobility.
•	Develop quality assurance.
•	Increase employability.
•	Develop the European Higher Education Area in a global context.
•	Develop joint degrees.
•	Recognition of qualifications.
•	Social dimension.
•	Lifelong learning.

The significance of the Bologna Process is that it constitutes an iterative and clearly focused programme of higher education reform, a model of higher education structure and priorities and a process which has gained and retained the commitment of participating countries from the level of national governments to the institutions, staff and students who play a role in implementing and shaping how technical matters of, for example, recognition of degrees, credit transfer or arrangements for mobility, impact upon the governance of the higher education sector. In essence, the Bologna Process has a set of priorities and the governance means to attain them.

The interaction between TEMPUS and the Bologna Process in the education initiatives is potentially a powerful one. Bologna establishes 10 fairly simple and clear objectives and therefore provides a ready‐made agenda for policy development. At the same time, it is a comprehensive list which encompasses all aspects, participants and stakeholders in the higher education system. The bottom‐up TEMPUS allied with the technical implementation of the Bologna Process potentially provides a strong implementation model for regulatory regionalism and the elaboration of accountability communities. The Bologna action lines also come with a set of technical problems, solutions and models for scrutiny or emulation, which gives an agenda for policy development with concrete and specific parameters, building on experience with the 46 signatories to the Bologna Process. In terms of building blocks for an emerging and regulated European Higher Education Area, the Bologna Process has produced clear sets of standards and guidelines for, for example, the European Quality Charter for Mobility or the European Quality Assurance Register.

It is important to emphasise this since the Bologna Process is exactly that: a process which is more than a script for higher education reform. While the Bologna action lines can serve as a template for other countries, an attractive model and a challenge for existing systems, as a process Bologna requires the engagement of all participants in higher education. À la carte Bologna is likely to do little more than destabilise higher education institutions and systems, result in paper reforms with little progress in effecting real transformation, or to constitute for some countries just another international club to join or a deceptively easy and cost‐efficient way of reaching higher education standards (Tomusk 1998).

At the same time, the Bologna Process embodies a series of norms of higher education reform: the linking together of inter‐governmental processes, with interactions between supranational and national agencies, individual higher education institutions, and their students and staff in a context of transparent discussion and realistic assessment and contestation of the effects of implementation. This carries a number of challenges for countries which are members and those non‐members, which include all of the Central Asian countries, which would seek to emulate it. In the context of Central Asia, the degree to which the steering of higher education policy is open to non‐governmental actors and institutions nationally, regionally and in relation to the EU, has to remain an open question.

The potential significance of the Bologna Process within the education initiatives is, as is the case with the TEMPUS programme, a question of the extent to which the dynamics which were already at play before the launch of the Central Asia strategy can be newly harnessed for the education initiatives or whether they will be inflected in particular ways by their mobilisation for broader EU–Central Asia strategic projects. A number of assessments can already be made.

The Bologna Process was already a factor in higher education reform before the launch of the education initiatives. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have already reformed aspects of their higher education systems along Bologna Process action lines. ¹⁵ Indeed, they have both tried to join the process and are the only two Central Asian countries who were invited to the Bologna Policy Forum as part of the Ministerial Meeting in Leuven in April 2009. ¹⁶ In their national strategies they have both set the adoption of the Bologna model as national priorities. Kazakhstan has moved to a three‐cycle university degree architecture and has made arrangements for credit transfer and the mutual recognition of degrees. It has clearly identified curriculum reform priorities in: engineering; sciences and technologies; social sciences and business; health; and social protection. In addition, Kazakhstan’s engagement with issues of governance reform, transformed university management and student services with a focus on quality assurance, are all in keeping with EU policy development processes and the embedded logic of accountability communities. Kazakhstan can be expected to continue to draw upon EU models for reform of its higher education sector.

Kyrgyzstan too is already closely involved in developing Bologna approaches. ¹⁷ Its country strategy paper, adopted in May 2009, reconfirmed the intention to adopt the principles of the Bologna Process in the context of harmonising higher education with international standards and adapt qualifications for labour market needs while at the same time enhancing quality, equity and student mobility. It is also developing a National Qualifications Framework (NQF) which may be increasingly compatible with the EU equivalent, the European Qualifications Framework (EQF).

Uzbekistan is equally committed to internationalisation processes in higher education. It has prioritised the reform of university management, a transformed degree structure, the development of new curricula and the re‐working of the connections between universities and enterprises. The isolation of Turkmenistan in all areas has of course its manifestation in education but in July 2007, the new president defined new priorities for higher education reform: international standards in education, science and technology and ICT development; and retraining of teachers from pre‐school institutions, schools, specialised secondary schools and higher education institutions, including modern education and information technologies institutions. Nonetheless, the implementation of the Bologna action lines would require a major reshuffling of the existing educational system over a long period of time. ¹⁸

It would be reasonable therefore to assume that the education initiatives carry the potential for Central Asia to become a mini‐Bologna with Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as bearers of the Bologna model for emulation, policy learning or even competitive copying. An interesting dynamic could be set up, with Central Asia constituting a club with sufficient homogeneity and heterogeneity to mean that productive and cooperative learning could take place with a measure of organised competition being conducive to an intensification both nationally and regionally of the implications of the Bologna action lines in practice.

However, the potential for the development of a regional area of course confronts the national and international politics in the region. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are the front runners and their shared language, culture and geographical proximity might make it more likely that they will push ahead, with higher education mobility for example being facilitated by a conducive visa regime. With the Bologna Process as a script and by utilising TEMPUS funding, it may well be that each of the countries is able to use the education initiatives to pursue modernisation. What is less likely at this stage is the mobilisation of the Bologna Process as process. National sensitivities internally and rivalries externally, particularly between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, are likely to condition the development of Central Asia as a sub‐region of Bologna over and above the importance of the technical question of whether any of the countries are invited to join the Bologna Process as signatories. In a sense then, what the education initiatives bring to the existing regulatory implications of the Bologna Process can be expected to be surprisingly little; long‐run dynamics are at play which would tend to argue against the likelihood of Central Asia as a region becoming an adjunct of the Bologna Process. Rather, the Central Asia states will continue to engage with the Bologna Process on national rather than regional lines.

Erasmus Mundus

The European Union’s Erasmus Mundus programme was established in 2004. It set up the means to establish consortia of EU higher education institutions which would enable mobility of staff and students and lead to the provision of joint European masters qualifications. Third country institutions including those from Central Asia were able to join the consortia from the outset but the development of the Erasmus Mundus External Cooperation Window for the budget period 2007–2013 provides funds explicitly for neighbouring countries in the South Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. The basis for participation is consortia of EU higher education institutions and third party institutions. For the period 2007–2008, 4.4 million euro were made available for the Central Asian region with 1.3 million euro for Kazkahstan and 3.1 million euro for the remaining Central Asian countries. The aim of Erasmus Mundus is to facilitate the exchange of persons, knowledge and skills in the higher education sector. The right of initiative lies with the EU higher education institutions and they must have gained the Erasmus Mundus Charter to assure that they have the procedures in place to operate the mobility scheme adequately and fairly. Again, and as with the Bologna Process and TEMPUS, the repertoire of regulatory regionalism provides a set of acute tools to identify the processes by which the Central Asia states have incrementally been involved in an increasingly thick and dense set of processes and mechanisms through which their higher education systems become affected by EU policies and programmes. The education initiatives potentially add to the existing processes and they certainly do so in quantitative terms: the available funds have been doubled to 10 million euro per year. Increased funding in the 2007–2013 period will then see a doubling of students and staff being mobile under the scheme.

At the same time, it should be recognised that the direction of mobility is largely from Central Asia to the EU (in 2007 39 individuals from the EU were mobile to Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan while 101 individuals were mobile to the EU). It is also important to emphasise that Erasmus Mundus, like the Erasmus programme itself, is not just a mobility programme. It contains a logic of promoting education change. As Corbett (2003, 2005) makes clear, there has always been a logic of higher education reform which has been enabled by trans‐European mobility. When students are mobile, they expect to have periods of study abroad recognised and this has implications for the management and certification of higher education qualifications. When they return to their country, experience and expectations can be inserted into the home context and be conducive to change. In tandem with the Bologna Process and TEMPUS it may well be that an increase in student and staff mobility will be reinforcing in terms of higher education change. There is an education reform logic in the extension of Erasmus Mundus which has potential, but whether it fulfils this potential and over what time‐frame will be a matter for future empirical and theoretical research. What it does constitute of course is a fundamentally bottom‐up process whereby individuals who are mobile become the bearers of implications for the content and processes of higher education in Central Asia. This is in principle a form of governance function, but one which is perhaps most adequately conceived as a form of funded disruption or irritation for existing governance structures, which are called upon to respond to the implications of the experiences and expectations of the mobile.

CAREN

The ambition of establishing an e‐silk highway has resulted in a new EU–Central Asia project: the Central Asia Research and Education Network (CAREN). In essence this project will build on the Virtual Silk Highway launched by the NATO Science Programme. ¹⁹ The NATO project was satellite‐based whereas CAREN will be a high speed terrestrial broadband network of up to 34 Mbps. With the establishment of the infrastructure for high capacity internet links, one million students and researchers in over 200 universities and research institutes in Central Asia will be able to interact with each other and to have access to the EU and global research community as a result of connection to the pan‐European GÉANT network. The CAREN project is expected to provide support in priority areas such as environmental monitoring, radio astronomy, telemedicine, the digitalisation of cultural heritage, e‐learning, palaeontology and mineral extraction. The provision of infrastructure will be led by the Cambridge, UK‐based company DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe) which was established in 1993 and which built and operates GÉANT with co‐funding from the European Commission Research and Development Framework Programme.

The June 2008 High Level Meeting as part of the Central Asia Strategy committed to the CAREN project. The EU co‐financed the project with five million euro out of the total cost of six million between 2009–2011. Each of the Central Asia countries has provided 20% of the remaining one million euro (200,000 euro each). The project began on 1 January 2009 and will initially run to 2011 with the CAREN network in operation in 2010. Executive and Steering Group Committees for CAREN have been established, chaired by the European Commission and involving the national coordinating bodies (National Research and Education Networks – NRENs) which have been quite quickly established in the Central Asian countries.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the CAREN project is the strand of the education initiatives which has made most progress. It was able to build upon a pre‐existing programme so it is not new in that sense but it is easy to see the added value, the concrete outcomes and the provision for organised participation. With EU money on the table, an infrastructure project, requiring the setting up of national bodies cooperating regionally and working to link up higher education institutions across the region, managed to cut through institutional delays and national sensitivities (and indeed national security issues). It built upon the NATO project which went before but was clear in conception, implementation and expected outcomes in a way which, thus far, the education platform for example, has not been. Given that this is a question of mobilising resources for an infrastructure project, signing contracts and working to strict deadlines rather than setting up the conditions for policy cooperation in complex and sensitive education systems, the level of progress is unsurprising. One of the underlying questions which this raises for the regulatory regionalism approach is to examine the structuring conditions for the elaboration of regional and regulatory projects. In this case, a physical infrastructure project with a large financial subsidy from the EU has the potential to stitch together the Central Asia states both speedily and with a range of ongoing implications. And in relation to the Erasmus Mundus and Tempus programmes, what seems to be important in EU–Central Asia relations is the provision of EU money. The Central Asia states have been prepared to take on the EU programmes with embedded but muted forms of implication for regionalisation and regulation when they have been tied to specific projects and been largely EU‐funded.

European Training Foundation

Vocational education and training (VET) is, together with higher education, one of the two priority areas for the education initiatives. To be led by the European Training Foundation (ETF), contributions to reform of the vocational sector within the education initiatives are to build on the long history of ETF engagement with the VET sector in Central Asia both regionally and bilaterally. Since 2005 the ETF has had two priority themes for its work in Central Asia: development of national qualifications frameworks (NQFs) and skills development for poverty reduction. The ETF has a history of developing regional policy debate with priority themes, development of regional exchange for policy learning and peer reviews involving the Central Asian countries. It is well respected by the governments in the region. With its past involvement in the implementation of TEMPUS it too, like DG EAC, has the personnel and experience to be productively engaged in networks developed through the education platform.

As the education initiatives have been formulated, the ETF has been able to continue with its established activities in the region and there has been some intensification of a regional approach to policy development. In June 2008, the ETF organised a meeting on NQFs in Kyrgyzstan. In October 2008, Dushanbe hosted the ETF Regional Conference on VET in Central Asia. In May 2009, the ETF launched a new initiative in Central Asia involving Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan: ‘School Development Towards Lifelong Learning.’ The ETF expectation is that Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan will be willing to participate in this programme from 2010. Projects like this have the potential to feed into the education platform, providing concrete examples of policy and implementation involving a broad range of policy actors. As with higher education modernisation priorities, the ETF is in a position to work with a limited set of policy themes and to establish some of the conditions for policy learning and emulation within emergent accountability communities. These are not eye‐catching initiatives however, and the extent to which the limitations of policy themes turn what should be political questions with regard to societal and economic development into questions which are purely about education systems and processes, or rather whether this tendency can be transcended by interaction with a developing education platform, will continue to be important empirical questions.

Information and communication actions

The education initiatives clearly carry a sense of seeking to engage with the education sector in Central Asia in ways which go beyond and beneath the high level government, education ministries and bodies responsible for the management of the education system. The intention is to hold joint events with broad participation, to publish joint materials and foster information and communication on both the education initiatives, and the opportunities available for mobility, exchange and cooperation, including through a web site, will be key to developing the education initiatives.

Given the slow progress which has been evident in the development of the education initiatives as presented above, it is no surprise that by 2009 there had been very little work done in communicating or disseminating the concrete strategic or implementation outputs of work undertaken to date. The education initiatives had a limited presence on the website of the European Commission’s External Cooperation Programmes web pages (www.ec.europa.eu) but these provided little detail beyond the specification of the strands of the education initiatives. The European Commission was in the process of publishing a compendium in English and Russian of funding opportunities for Central Asian staff, students and higher education institutions. This would include details of mobility, cooperation, exchange and scholarship opportunities available through the EU programmes and provided by EU Member States. It would provide a tangible version of the kinds of information provided by the Study In Europe initiative (http://www.study-in-europe.org).

The education initiatives and the EU–Central Asia strategy

As outlined above, the different components of the education initiatives have developed with their own tempos and dynamics. Some assessment of what has been achieved is now possible but the key aspirations (regional cooperation, generation and maintenance of networks engaged in policy change and implementation, and mobilisation of existing programmes, actions and funding to achieve greater impact and regional governance of education) will take time before their potential is fulfilled or not. Nonetheless, a number of features of the development of the education initiatives are now relatively clear and the extent to which they remain important may well condition the prospects for the education initiatives, and therefore, by extension, the value of a regulatory regionalism approach to EU–Central Asia educational inter‐regionalism.

The rather uncertain nature of the way these initiatives have developed does give fuel to those who criticise them as being empty boxes, add‐on components of the overall Central Asia strategy with little beyond a generalised interest in education reform to generate and sustain a strategic and compelling vision of what would amount to more than continuing with existing initiatives. As discussed above, the components of the education initiatives do contain the potential to externalise some of the EU’s internal policy development processes and regulatory regionalism does capture some of the ways in which this could become significant. Whether the potentialities have been either recognised and/or concertedly addressed as the initiatives have developed is a separate question. At this stage, the argument which the evidence presented here would support is that they have not. The reasons for this would be as follows.

Rather than being empty boxes, the education initiatives are concrete and prioritised, but to date they have done little more than re‐brand existing activities. TEMPUS, Erasmus Mundus and even the CAREN programme are not new, but they presumably looked concrete and successful, and perhaps as importantly, as easy to both achieve and mould to the particular requirements of the Central Asia strategy. In terms of higher education and VET, the availability of existing EU policy development scripts and instruments constitutes a coherent agenda for policy development, but the education initiatives do little to add to what was already there other than add some, not insignificant, additional funding. The implication of this is that the extension of a role for the EU in inter‐regional regulation cannot be willed. The EU has been involved in the region since 1991 and even while making more funds available and working with a commitment to regional cooperation from the Central Asian states, significant barriers exist.

Within the education initiatives, the development of an education platform is the most problematic and EU regional and institutional factors help to explain why. The Central Asia strategy was driven by the German presidency and EU foreign relations perspectives. Foreign relations actors within the Commission and the Council of Ministers produced the blue‐print for the education initiatives. The EU bodies which might have been expected to be involved in developing the education initiatives (DG EAC, the ETF and national Central Asia education policy actors, for example) were not closely involved. Education experts were not involved in the formulation of the education initiatives at either EU or Central Asian national levels. In this sense, it would not be a regulatory regional approach which would explain the EU–Central Asia strategy and the place of the education initiatives within it, but rather a realist foreign relations perspective: international diplomacy and high level political contacts are the focus and the education initiatives with an embedded logic of regulatory regionalism are conditioned by a foreign relations lens. In this respect, it is high level political sensitivity within the context of the hierarchy of policy objectives and interests which the EU and Central Asia states have, which determines the content and processes which will be enabled.

To date, the education initiatives have been overwhelmingly the preserve of presidencies, foreign relations and Ministry of Finance levels in the governments of Central Asia. From Central Asian education policy actors, the assessment is that there has been a very limited role for Ministries of Education in formulating, specifying or operationalising the education initiatives. Networks have not been established and the willingness of Central Asian governments to facilitate the participation of their policy actors in such networks has not been tested. The stated EU aspiration and expectation is that long‐term, bottom‐up improvement in regional cooperation is made possible by the establishment of networks between state institutions represented at expert level, civil society organisations and individuals, and that the education initiatives therefore carry the potential to contribute both to education policy development and the building up of trust (Council of the European Union 2006). Of course, this requires a long term view but it is also predicated on the establishment of these levels of interaction. To date there has been no attempt to establish them.

The education initiatives have sustained a measure of support from the high level of government in the Central Asia countries. In a sense this is to be expected. Provision of education is a significant cost for the countries; it is associated with concerns for the development of the countries and in particular the levels of social aspiration and potential unrest. Education in this sense is related to concerns over levels of development and future economic and societal models. Participation in the education initiatives is a sign of good‐faith by both EU and Central Asia participants in the education strands and the overall Central Asia strategy. As the CAREN project demonstrates, this generalised support can be very constructively mobilised and built upon. However, whether this commitment has been tested and challenged in other areas is an important question. The foreign relations perspective would suggest that it has not been because the focus has been on developing high level political relations. ²⁰ Only after the context for cooperation has been firmly established, giving time for the content and implications of cooperation to be agreed, assimilated and digested, would it be appropriate for greater challenges to be included in the agenda for policy cooperation. Rather than a generic regional approach, a targeted bilateral approach would conform to a foreign relations view of the place of education in the Central Asia strategy. Central to this would be the need for a discreet approach. The lack of transparency and concrete work plans is explicable from this perspective.

The education initiatives imply the development of a degree of regional governance of higher education and VET systems in Central Asia with the EU exercising an influence which serves to promote its interests. The European Commission has a clearly defined position on the importance of developing higher education within the EU and on maximising its attractiveness for incoming and fee‐paying students and researchers who can make a contribution to the EU’s transition to a competitive knowledge‐based economy. The Bologna Process and its promotion of mobility is not neutral in this respect and the influence of the EU in promoting particular kinds of higher education reform in Central Asia is not necessarily disinterested either. However, the aspiration to create a Central Asian education space as a sub‐region of Bologna would need to be achieved in order for it to be a factor in the promotion of EU interests. In truth though, the Central Asia region has scant experience of policy co‐ordination; its economic and social development, dynamics of national cooperation and competition and relations with the EU are likely to mitigate against the effects of setting up institutional forums, policy instruments and effective and influential networks of policy actors.

Conclusion

This discussion of the rolling out of a set of education initiatives as part of the EU–Central Asia strategy is suggestive of a number of conclusions with regard to the purchase which a regulatory regionalism approach offers.

Firstly, it must be underlined that while the EU might have a set of discourses, norms, policy schema, instruments, epistemic resources and so on, all of the resources of accountability communities, all of the components which Jayasuriya conceives of as being part of regulatory regionalism, and the extent to which inter‐regional regulation develops and gains traction are dependent on a host of factors.

Central to this is the context of the region into which the EU intends to roll‐out its internal policy dynamics. The evidence of the development of the education initiatives provided here points to the need to take account of how activities associated with the ETF, TEMPUS, the Bologna Process and so on, constitute an EU policy agenda, and beyond the formal commitment to them provided by the Central Asia countries, there is little sense of any willingness on the side of the Central Asian countries to do more than participate in them as a region.

The EU could more robustly seek to work on policy development regarding the under‐funding of education, the inadequacy of teacher training, or indeed any of the host of real educational problems which the Central Asia states face. But to do so would require the EU to be more challenging and demanding. There is little sense of the EU being prepared to countenance a more robust approach. Rather, it falls back on the long‐term potential for accountability communities to develop, but in the meantime, it is high level politics within the overarching EU–Central Asia strategy which dominates.

As developed to this point, the education initiatives have been neither transparent nor participatory. The prospect of opening up for participation, developing discussion at levels beneath the commanding heights of the authoritarian governments of the Central Asian states, seems remote. The stated values and norms of the EU, the core of the processes associated with a regulatory regionalism approach, have simply not been embodied in the processes surrounding the education initiatives. Debates and exchanges involving parliaments, civil society, local authorities, education institutions, staff and students, indeed all of the flexibility and shifts associated with regulatory regionalism and accountability communities, have been neither insisted upon nor offered in this example of inter‐regionalism.

It may well be that the slow pace of defining and developing the education initiatives can be seen as (a) a necessary phase in the establishment of trust; and (b) a barrier to be overcome in the longer term. Nonetheless, the outcomes of the de‐politicisation and the search for concrete and technical matters for consideration by the putative education platform as an incipient accountability community, would tend to indicate that in the Central Asian context, de‐politicisation is not an option. The Central Asian states are not interested in bracketing politics. The de‐politicisation associated with the open method of coordination has not been successful within the EU (EuroMemorandum 2009); there seems little prospect of it being successfully externalised.

High politics and institutional micro‐politics within the EU institutions would tend to argue against the extent to which external relations can ever be de‐politicised. Education policy development at the EU level is not neutral; it is riven with competing priorities and agendas, conflicts and dilemmas associated with capacity, mandate and legitimacy. The characteristics of regulatory regionalism and their attendant accountability communities presented in this article, when brought into focus by exploring a particular policy domain, in this case education policy, certainly reveal themselves to be descriptively adequate and they do accord with the rationale and self‐description of the EU’s inter‐regional project. However, in practice and in the context of the EU and Central Asia, they constitute an only partially explicit aspiration, which even the EU is unwilling to pursue in the context of an overarching strategy which has more to do with foreign relations and diplomacy conducted by governments pursuing interests, than governance and the power of soft power.

Notes on contributor

Dr. Peter Jones is a lecturer in Post‐Compulsory Education at the University of Southampton in the UK. His research has investigated the establishment and amplification of a European Union role in education policy development, the implications of accession to the EU for education systems in post‐socialist countries and the importance of Higher Education reform for the achievement of EU knowledge economy ambitions.

Notes

1. The research which provides the empirical material in this paper was conducted in June 2009 and involved interviews with policy actors from the European Union institutions and in the Central Asian states. The research was funded by the EU Central Asia Monitoring (EUCAM) project (www.eucentralasia.eu). Interviews were conducted on a non‐attributable basis and the author would like to thank the participants for the frankness with which they supported the research and for the access which they provided to details and documents relating to the EU–Central Asia education initiatives.

2. David Harvey’s assessment of contemporary regimes of governance and regulation is framed in terms of a critique of neoliberalism. On the structural coupling and political consequences of shifts to regionalism and regulation within neo‐liberal governance, see Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2009). Jayasuriya’s conceptualisation is congruent when he talks about how state and state‐like activity has shifted from ‘government (direct intervention) to governance (facilitating intervention)’ (Jayasuriya 2003, 205).

3. Jayasuriya terms this institutional process the locus of meta‐regulation.

4. Jayasuriya’s sense is that regulatory regionalism captures: ‘the way in which this governance provides the basis for a new form of statehood, that creates a semblance of regional frontiers within the state by transforming the “regulatory space of the state” in which political and economic governance takes place’ (Jayasuriya 2009, 7).

5. These processes of course combine with Jessop’s (2004) insistence on the emergent developments of shadow hierarchies and the concomitant development of meta‐governance. This point is echoed by Jayasuriya in terms of how: ‘Multilevel governance enables different national systems of Higher Education to retain elements of regulatory architecture, but subject to a system of meta‐governance that monitors and enforces a broad set of benchmark standards’ (Jayasuriya 2009, 7).

6. Jayasuriya talks about the de‐political in terms of how, ‘de‐politicisation – or even better, a strategy of anti‐politics – provides the underlying rationale for many governance programmes’ (Jayasuriya 2003, 206).

7. In Jessop’s (2004) sense the capacity for strategic shifts in policy content, the activity of participants’ levels and the scales of governance as the limits of each are tested and reconfirmed, are key characteristics of contemporary modes of governance.

8. One sign of the calamitous position of young people in Central Asia which constitutes a major challenge to the societies and the related demands to be made of education policy and systems, is the pressures toward migration. As Silova et al. (2007) argue: ‘when a public school system collapses – whether from poverty, moral corruption or ideological backwardness – individuals take extraordinary measures to find opportunities to learn from more viable and compelling sources… Over 70 per cent of young people in Central Asia are ready to migrate to any country in search of better educational and economic opportunities’ (174–5).

9. For example, the Deputy Minister of Education and Science from Kyrgyzstan was present and made a presentation: ‘A Central Asia perspective: Education reform in Kyrgyzstan’.

10. As early as 2001, the Commission sought to promote increased EU funding in this regard in terms of the, ‘desirability of increasing the numbers of long term grants for students from third countries seeking a full period of study in the EC’ (European Commission 2001, 5).

11. The Commission has expressed this in relation to the assertion that, ‘Europe’s political and commercial success in the world is dependent on future decision‐makers in third countries having a better understanding of and closer ties with Europe’ (European Commission 2001, 3).

12. Only Monaco and San Marino of the Council of Europe members are not signatories to the Bologna Process.

13. The Ministers met in Prague in 2001, Berlin in 2003, Bergen in 2005, London in 2007 and Leuven in 2009. It was at the Berlin meeting that the decision was made to make participation in the Bologna Process open to signatories to the European Cultural Convention. In addition to the governmental participation, the Bologna Process now has clearly defined roles for the European Commission, UNESCO and the Council of Europe as well as a series of non‐governmental bodies: the European Studies Union (ESU), the European Universities Association (EUA), the European Association of Institutions of Higher Education (EURASHE) and the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA).

14. The original six were: (i) adoption of a system of easily readable and comparable degrees; (ii) adoption of a system essentially based on two cycles (bachelor and masters); (iii) establishment of a system of credits; (iv) promotion of mobility; (v) promotion of European cooperation in quality assurance; (vi) promotion of the European dimension in higher education.

15. Both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have made repeated attempts to join the Bologna Process but the insuperable barrier is non‐membership of the Council of Europe.

16. The Bologna Policy Forum is to be reconvened in 2010. The participating countries in 2009 were Australia, Brazil, Canada, the PR of China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Tunisia and the US in addition to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

17. The Kyrgyz position is clear however: high level support, and this was signalled by the attendance of the Vice Prime Minister at the first meeting of the Bologna Policy Forum in April 2009.

18. For Silova, in 2005: ‘Postgraduate education in Turkmenistan does not exist. Postgraduate students continue their education at higher institutions of neighbouring countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrygzstan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and at higher institutions in the European Union, Turkey, the USA, China, Japan etc’ (Silova 2005, 57).

19. The CAREN project is another component of a developing comprehensive set of EU initiatives in network provision. CAREN will link Central Asia with the BSI (Black Sea Initiative), TEIN2 (Eastern Asia), ORIENT (China), EUROMEDCONNECT2 (the Mediterranean), ALICE2 (Latin America) and TEIN3 (Asia‐Pacific).

20. There is an underlying approach to the region from the RELEX perspective: the nature of the regimes in the region means that little can be attempted in terms of engaging with education officials until the cover of governmental approval has been provided.