Quality assurance in the European policy arena

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

ScienceDirect Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176 www.elsevier.com/locate/polsoc

Quality assurance in the European policy arena Ju¨rgen Enders a, Don F. Westerheijden b,* a

b

School of Management, University of Bath, United Kingdom Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands

Abstract Our paper investigates the emergence, development and contested nature of quality assurance (QA) in the European policy arena as part and parcel of the Bologna Process. We conceptualise our paper on the background of the study of multi-level and multi-actor dynamics between national, inter-governmental and supranational policies; we discuss the changing ideational framing of QA in the European policy arena, and attempts at European norm-setting and standardisation. QA in the Bologna Process moved from a nonbinding inter-governmental agreement towards monitored coordination and became embedded in the competitive turn in European higher education policy stressing an instrumental view of the university. QA policies unfold coercive pressure for convergence alongside soft templates and prototypes of ‘best practice’. The impressive architecture of Bologna leaves, however, ample room for national and institutional design in policy implementation and a variety of preferences and interests of actors at different levels. # 2014 Policy and Society Associates (APSS). Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Quality assurance; Europe; Policy arena; Ideational framing; Norm-setting; Standardisation

1. Introduction European higher education has shown itself to be no stranger to change. During the last three decades, the sector has been included in transformations of political systems in Central and Eastern Europe subsequently joining European public sector reform movements that also affect higher education. Since the 1990s, the rate of change has accelerated to unprecedented levels, largely on the shoulders of two European political key agendas: the Bologna Process, whose objectives are to create a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and to make European higher education more competitive and attractive in a globalising world, and the European Union’s (EU) growth and innovation strategies (formerly the Lisbon Strategy), which seek to reform the continent’s higher education and research systems into a more powerful motor for the European knowledge economy. The ‘Modernization Agenda’ of the European Commission (EC) could be added as the third key development, bringing together the reform agendas of the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy and linking them up with a New Public Management (NPM)-inspired agenda for the modernisation of higher education institutions. In the following, our main focus will be on the Bologna Process and its links to the emergence and unfolding of quality assurance (QA) on the inter-governmental and supra-national policy agenda. QA entered the higher education

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J. Enders), [email protected] (D.F. Westerheijden). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polsoc.2014.09.004 1449-4035/# 2014 Policy and Society Associates (APSS). Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

168

J. Enders, D.F. Westerheijden / Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176

agenda of different European countries in the 1980s and 1990s, usually due to a combination of factors, including fiscal limitations during a time of recession preventing further growth of higher education budgets, the enlarged role of higher education for an increasing variety of functions in the emerging knowledge economies, and the ensuing ‘massification’ of higher education which pushed national governments over their span of control with traditional policy tools (especially regulation and line-item budgeting), thus giving rise to the ‘evaluative state’ (Neave, 1994, 1998; van Vught, 1989) and a variety of reforms all called NPM (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011). In 1992, with the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union, the EU began to expand its interest in higher education beyond facilitating mobility and opening the European labour markets. Ever since, the European level has played a role in QA for higher education, building up quickly to the intensity of the Bologna Process. Three issues will be addressed in this article, which together produce a coherent analysis of QA in the European policy arena. First, we take an actor-centred perspective in mapping the European policy arena as a multi-actor and multi-level playing field (see Enders, 2004; Finnemore, 1996; Martens & Wolf, 2009; Ravinet, 2008; Witte, 2006). We look at the role of national and supra-national actors involved in the policy process, new actors entering the policy arena or emerging out of the policy process itself, the role of preferences and interests of these political actors, and how the European arena is mobilised for national policies while also unfolding coercive power among countries. Second, we address the ideational framing of QA in the European policy arena, most namely the influence of neoliberal, NPM-inspired conceptions of employability and accountability and the influence of policy narratives around globalisation and international competition. ‘Shifts in framing’ points to the role of ideational factors for explaining policy-making trajectories and policy transformations (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Ferlie, Musselin, & Andresani, 2008). Authors following a discursive approach (Fisher, 2003; Radaelli, 2005; Stone, 1997) show the influence of causal narratives in the conception of new reforms, and how new actors can gain influence because they provide new narratives of change and success. The study of ideational change might also point to deeper ‘discursive turns’ in the social re-construction of the role higher education is expected to fulfil within society and economy. Third, we look at the emergence, development and eventually the institutionalisation of templates and prototypes for QA in higher education in the European policy arena as attempts for norm-setting and standardisation. Following Room (2000), we see international standard-setting as an attempt to deal with challenges of globalisation in its various inter-related forms of social globalisation, market globalisation, and political globalisation. More specifically, we build on a useful distinction between programmatic elements of standardisation and the technological or operational elements introduced by Power (1997) when characterising NPM-policies. While the programmatic element refers to the ideas, aims and objectives of a certain policy, the technological element refers to the specific tasks or routines of which this policy consists. 2. Multi-actor, multi-level policy dynamics Higher education policy in Europe has been and is an arena where contestations take place between national policies, inter-governmental policies and supra-national European policies about their political authority as well as about the main principles guiding the course of action. On the one hand, the European Union, and before that the European Economic Community since the Treaty of Rome, 1957, focused on stimulating the emergence of a European labour market and saw education as (vocational) training of the future labour force. On the other hand, nation states in Europe defended education as a policy area within their own sovereignty, arguing that it was the main vehicle to transmit national values and national culture. This antagonism played out differently at different moments of time while it remains a fruitful way of looking at developments in education and especially in higher education policy up to this day. Other major players in the arena include stakeholder organisations that emerged mostly with the growth of the EU to lobby for their constituencies directly at the European level, taking in stride other European cooperative organisations or arenas such as the Council of Europe, the OECD or UNESCO’s regional activities.1 Europe is an arena in which multiple actors, with authorities at multiple levels, interact to influence the path that higher education will take in the future. Perspectives, powers and possibilities of actors in this arena have changed over time. 1 In recent years, networks of usually around one or a few dozen higher education institutions have also emerged on the scene, but for the sake of our discussion, we can mostly ignore these smaller players. We will also ignore sub-national players, although we recognise that some European countries have devolved authority regarding higher education to sub-national authorities (e.g. Belgium, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom).

J. Enders, D.F. Westerheijden / Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176

169

Quality and QA in higher education have been major themes around which much of the policy discussions can be organised, as they were topics addressed not just for their own sake, but also in relation to processes of internationalisation and globalisation as well as issues of professional and academic recognition of higher education degrees across Europe. The Bologna Process that emerged out of the Sorbonne Declaration (1998, inter-governmental agreement between Ministers in charge for education from France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom) is an obvious and important landmark for European higher education policies. The three continental European countries involved in the Sorbonne Declaration felt an urgent need of national higher education reform, perceived the UK as a potential role model and chose not to use the EU as the channel to take higher education reform forwards but to sign an inter-governmental declaration. The reasons for this course of action included (see Enders & Westerheijden, 2011):  Authority and sovereignty: the EU had no official competence in education. This had been reconfirmed earlier in the decade, when education had for the first time been incorporated in an EU treaty (the Maastricht Treaty of 1992) while its scope for action of the EU had been severely limited by formulating the subsidiarity principle. The subsidiarity principle keeps all policy areas out of EU reach that could be handled at the member state level, last but not least the field of education.  Need for speed: France, Italy and Germany had been struggling to get some reform of their national higher education systems off the ground and perceived the inter-governmental approach as a ‘window of opportunity’ to increase pressure for action back home. Taking the EU route would have meant too much delay. Experience in other policy fields showed that EU procedures, consultation with all member states, councils and committees, etc., would take years and would end in compromise policies that would not necessarily be effective as a lever for national reform. Other European countries did not want to be left behind when at the turn of the millennium these four major countries seemed to be taking a decisive step in European higher education policy. Paraphrasing Alice’s plight on the chess-board (Carroll, 1981), if they did not start running with the leading four, they feared they would fall behind. In the Sorbonne Declaration, the focus had been on structural reform towards a two-cycle higher education system: shorter study programmes, enabling students to reach the labour market faster, with options to continue studying in a second cycle for a master and/or doctoral degree (the ‘Y-model’ prevalent in France and in the UK). The priority was to make the national economies more resilient and assertive in the global competition, simultaneously making the much-wanted EU-wide and global mobility easier because of harmonised structures and degree titles (Westerheijden et al., 2010). In the run-up to the Bologna Declaration, it became already clear to the drafting team that international compatibility and recognition would need measures to ensure that similar degree names and structures would indeed be comparable across countries. That is why QA arose as an issue in the Bologna Process, later formalised into an ‘action line’. During the drafting of the Bologna Declaration, thoughts went in the direction of accreditation. Accreditation is distinguished from other external QA mechanisms by the formal, summative statement that the study programme or higher education institution that has been evaluated satisfies previously published threshold quality criteria (Schwarz & Westerheijden, 2004). Such a summative statement seemed an ideal, brief, comprehensible way to communicate compatibility of higher education degrees across country borders. Since the fall of communism, accreditation had indeed become a common practice in the Central and Eastern European countries that made up almost half of the signatory countries of the Bologna Declaration in 1999. For the Western European countries this was, however, a new and alien concept, not fitting with the practices of external QA in this part of Europe which were just gaining ground or had been established for not much more than a decade (Schwarz & Westerheijden, 2004). Accordingly, the Bologna Declaration made no mention of accreditation and limited itself to calling for cooperation in QA (European Ministers Responsible for Higher Education, 1999). Like the Sorbonne Declaration, the Bologna Declaration was made outside the EU procedures. We may surmise this was done for the same reasons of reform speed and national sovereignty we mentioned above; formally, one might add that in the Bologna Declaration almost half the signatories were not EU members. Bologna as a political process of horizontal integration was thus based on soft governance, where national policies are coordinated by agreement at the European level but national governments try to remain in full control of the decision process, transformation into national contexts, and implementation. The cooperation of countries in the Bologna Process is formally speaking voluntary and not binding and thus without the legal consequences of conventional EU processes of supranational steering and hierarchical direction.

170

J. Enders, D.F. Westerheijden / Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176

Yet within a few years, the European Commission (EC) became a permanent member of the coordinating mechanism in the implementation structure of the Bologna Process, i.e. the Bologna Follow-Up Group (BFUG), and it funded all international projects undertaken in the Bologna Process. Already since the late 1960s the EU had managed to establish some political influence in the field of education. Political authority and influence were ‘borrowed’ from related though different policy fields such as labour market policies and policies for lifelong learning that allowed these to link up with educational policy. Pollack (1994) introduced the term ‘creeping competence’ for this process of growing EU influence in domains long regarded as strongly protected national areas of political competence. Other activities of the EC provided further ground for intervention in the highly sensitive political field and for intergovernmental approaches. The EU-mobility programmes introduced, for example, certain issues to European higher education that became core to the Bologna Process such as mutual exchange, comparability, and recognition. Thus ‘European policies have given nation states both the idea that a solution to national problems must be searched for at the international level, as well as that such a solution must entail at least a certain degree of convergence between single education systems’ (Balzer and Rusconi, 2007, p. 59). The EC soon realised that Bologna was not only in line with some previous European policies for higher education but was going in promising future directions for EU policies. The Commission actually paid for most of the preparatory work in the initial phase of the Bologna Process and was involved in the drafting of the Bologna Declaration, even though kept at arms-length. In 2001, the Commission became an official member of the Process and is nowadays also included in the Bologna Follow-Up Group. Horizontal integration in the Bologna Process thus opened a window of opportunity for the EC to insert elements of vertical integration and to intervene in intergovernmental policies that were originally meant to avoid growing supranational competence in this field. These multi-level dynamics are interesting in themselves: the EC was in search of authority in the field of higher education providing some grounds for the idea that QA is an issue for European education and labour markets, and that Europe is an appropriate level for policy-making in this field. More or less against that, the country-level authorities designed (an emergent design, in an incremental ‘muddling through’ or ‘bricolage’ manner) Bologna as an intergovernmental process. From their perspective, national interests were paramount and the European argument was mobilised as a lever for solving problems in higher education back home. These contrary tendencies resulted in the establishment of soft but powerful mechanisms for governance in the field that took inspiration from models like the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) being established at the same time in other policy fields in which the EU was becoming active but had little authority (Gornitzka, 2005). Like in other fields, then, in higher education a system of soft but potentially powerful governance instruments was put in place in a policy field that had proven to be impervious to European vertical integration and hierarchical control. European QA became integrated in to a system of reporting, benchmarking, and stocktaking that provides a synthetic, easily readable, and widely distributed overview of what has been achieved and not achieved in all participating countries. The stocktaking exercise of the Bologna Process signals a competitive turn (Enders, 2010) in the political management of the Process; and naming, blaming, and shaming can impose enormous pressure on national policymakers that are formally speaking participating in an unbinding political process based on voluntary agreement. This move ‘from voluntary participation to monitored coordination’ (Ravinet, 2008) creates effects of socialisation and imitation that lend further support to the political success story of Bologna. In the Bologna Process, new actors appeared on the European scene, too. As we will discuss below, through their European association ENQA, the QA agencies acquired a position in the BFUG separate from their national education ministries (if they were governmental agencies; for other QA agencies, ENQA was their first and only avenue of influence). Further, higher education institutions established representative organisations (the European University Association (EUA) for the traditional, research-oriented universities, and the European Association of Institutions in Higher Education (EURASHE) for the teaching-based, professionally oriented universities of applied science) and the student unions organised themselves in the European Student Union (ESU). These four organisations became known as the E4 in the BFUG and they opened the arena for new framings of Bologna Process policies. 3. Ideational framing of policies The previous section has already hinted at some of the emergent themes within the reform discourse around QA and the Bologna Process and related shifts in framing supranational, national and inter-governmental agendas that are partly in competition with each other while partly converging. The study of ideational change points also to deeper

J. Enders, D.F. Westerheijden / Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176

171

‘discursive turns’ around QA and the Bologna Process as regards the social re-construction of the role higher education is expected to fulfil within society and economy. Two lines of argument stand out. The first one is about policy borrowing and the early diffusion of Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal conceptions of employability and accountability (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011) in the regulation and control of public service provision in higher education. In this frame the EU’s creeping involvement in higher education can be understood as an early attempt to cast higher education primarily in instrumental terms as preparation for the (European) labour market (Pertek & Soverovski, 1992). The EC emphasised this in its early Joint Study Programmes schemes and added student mobility in 1984, which soon evolved into the ERASMUS programme (de Wit, 2002). In those days, in the EC’s approach ‘Pluralism and complementarity [were] . . . more dominant than harmonization and Europeanization’ (de Wit, 2002, p. 52). Yet, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) already judged in the groundbreaking cases Gravier (case 293/83, decided in 1985) and Blaizot (case 24/86, decided in 1988) that all of higher education could be seen as vocational training. Kent called the ECJ’s interpretation of European rules in the Gravier case ‘imaginative’ (Kent, 2008, p. 250) while the instrumental perspective on the role of higher education for the European labour market also legitimised that education was included in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty: to give a legal basis for the EU’s involvement in higher education. Providing a legal basis was, however, like drawing a borderline: the EU member states had to accept that the EC could initiate policies in higher education, but the EC had to give up ‘a great deal of freedom for creative programmatic action’ (de Wit, 2002, p. 52). This borderline remained fluid and contested; and immediately after the Maastricht Treaty the EC focused on QA as a new angle for opening up the European higher education market. An inventory was made of the state of QA which showed that four countries were ahead of the other member states: France, the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark (van Vught & Westerheijden, 1993). Policy entrepreneurs from these four countries took the lead in the ensuing EU pilot project, which actively spread the experiences in QA from these four countries to the other EU states. After three years of debate, the project’s outcome (Management Group, 1995) led to the establishment of an EU network of quality assessment agencies (ENQA) (Kern, 1998). ENQA was intended for exchange of methodological experiences among QA agencies only. Harmonization and ranking of higher education institutions were to be avoided, it said in the EC’s communication proposing the establishment of ENQA; transparency and free movement in the single European market were, however, mentioned as well (Kern, 1998, which has as an annex EC’s COM(97)159 final). The communication also mentioned that freedom of movement required ‘an open education area with mutual recognition of qualifications’, foreshadowing major themes of the Bologna Process. The second line of argument is about globalisation, the knowledge economy, and international competition as policy narratives underpinning the argument about the need for QA in European higher education. The instrumental view of higher education as a tool to prepare the population for the labour market also underpins this line of argument. In the first line of argument the attention was on the individual aspects of the labour market connection (student and graduate mobility), in the second attention shifts to the national and supra-national level. Higher education is not an ivory tower, not a disinterested search for truth, but an instrument in a nation’s international competition for increasing wealth. This conception gained increased momentum in the last half of the 1990s when economic, social and political inter-connectivity and competition were perceived as speeding up and dramatically changing the global landscape— also among policy makers in higher education. In their eyes, higher education had to deliver more graduates and better ones; QA was the obvious tool in this view to refocus and modernise higher education curricula for the new requirements. This feeling of a need for immediate reform was already visible in the French initiative for the Sorbonne Declaration; the plan-Attali (Attali, 1998) was explicit in its emphasis on the need for France to reform its higher education for global competition. Somewhat toned down, the same needs for speedy reform and for standing up to the rest of the world can be read in the Sorbonne and Bologna Declarations. After the symbolic language of its opening paragraphs, the Bologna Declaration refers to the example set by the Sorbonne Declaration in terms of the cultural discourse about the role of universities that had been acceptable in the higher education policy community for decades while immediately being intertwined with the economic rationale in the terms of ‘mobility and employability’. And the argumentation for the concrete action lines then ends with: ‘We must in particular look at the objective of increasing the international competitiveness of the European system of higher education’ (European Ministers Responsible for Higher Education, 1999). In combination with the action lines focusing on degree reform and recognition of degrees across countries, the actual ideational intent is in line with higher education reform for the knowledge economy in order to make Europe competitive in the world. It is equally telling that according to the Bologna Declaration higher education was to acquire ‘a world-wide degree of attraction’; student mobility thus

172

J. Enders, D.F. Westerheijden / Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176

became seen as a competitive market in itself—and Europe wanted to gain in global competitiveness compared to the global winners in this competition (the USA, UK and Australia, but not the continental European countries) for which international student mobility was becoming a major source of income at the time (van Vught, van der Wende, & Westerheijden, 2002). The globalisation discourse has not been without its critics. In the Bologna Process, the most vocal ‘anti-globalists’ were the representatives of the universities, EUA, and of the students, ESU. Largely through their influence—though their advocacy probably found sympathy with many ministerial representatives— higher education has also been emphasised as a public good, not a tradable commodity. In Prague in 2001, the Ministers stated in the communique´ of the first follow-up conference that higher education should be considered a public good, that it was and would remain a public responsibility and that students were full members of the higher education community. Students’ membership in higher education institutions was reinforced in the same sentence. These statements on the public good character and students’ membership fit in the ideational frame of the Humboldtian university and the Neo-Weberian State but not in the NPM view of the university as a service provider. In the same Prague communique´, the student unions’ influence can also be discerned in the appearance of the social dimension of higher education on the Bologna Process agenda. Yet this change of the ideational balance in the Bologna Process communications did not immediately affect the activities of implementing the Bologna Process in national policies. The implementation of the Bologna Process followed its own logic. At first, most attention went to creating similar types of two-cycle (after the Berlin ministerial meeting in 2003: three-cycle) degree structures. But soon it was realised that to enable global mobility and international recognition of degrees, more than nominal degree compatibility was becoming urgent. The action line of achieving cooperation in QA to achieve compatible methodologies gained priority. The first achievement in this action line was the formulation of what we called the Dublin Descriptors: a brief, general definition of first-cycle and second-cycle levels expected learning outcomes (Westerheijden & Leegwater, 2003). This brief set of statements changed the QA action line from sharing of methodologies among QA-experts to a set of norms for higher education teachers; the Bologna Process gained tremendous power over all European higher education institutions in this seemingly innocuous manner. 4. International norm-setting and standardisation The shift of the Bologna Process from compatibility of methodologies in QA to defining actual (though abstract) standards for European higher education fits in the whole project of ‘harmonisation in European higher education’ as an attempt for norm-setting and standardisation (see Room, 2000). Unlike binding vertical integration and hierarchical control, the process works via the development of templates (soft standardisation) and prototypes (soft norm-setting via ‘best practice’) for European convergence. The Dublin Descriptors and their later elaboration into qualifications frameworks for the EHEA2 are a case in point. The Dublin Descriptors opened up a new area of activity at the European level; until the Sorbonne and Bologna Declarations the axiom in European circles had been that the variety of higher education was Europe’s unique strength and an internationally harmonised understanding of degree levels was anathema. Being very abstract (stating in fact: ‘all bachelors know x and are able to do y’) the Dublin Descriptors are only templates, which consciously leave room for national, institutional and disciplinary specification, and for diverse ways of getting to the described levels, e.g. through a 240 EC study programme versus a 180 EC one. The Bologna Process soon incorporated an EU project that could act as a prototype in this respect; the project Tuning higher education structures which in contrast to its name is not about structures but about expected learning outcomes specified in different disciplines. The methodology developed in the first Tuning projects functioned as a prototype for a growing number of disciplines aiming at norm-setting for European higher education. Another case in point, and the next major step in the QA action line in the Bologna Process, is the formulation of the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the EHEA (ESG), which the Ministers of higher education accepted as norms for the methodology of QA in the Bologna Process in 2005 (European Association for 2 The qualifications framework for the EHEA applies to all 47 countries in the Bologna Process and only concerns the three cycles of higher education. A parallel development in the EU led to the formulation of a qualifications framework encompassing all levels of qualifications, in which higher education prepares for the levels 5–8.

J. Enders, D.F. Westerheijden / Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176

173

Quality Assurance in Higher Education, 2005). Cooperation among quality assessment agencies with a view to developing comparable criteria and methodologies was closer to the core of the quality assessment agencies’ identity and practices at that time. The ESG did not develop any content-type criteria as the Dublin Descriptors did but contained a set of seven criteria for what higher education institutions needed to include in their QA procedures: a quality policy, regular curriculum (re-) approval, student assessment, staff quality, resources, information systems, and public information. This checklist made up Part I of the ESG. With regard to common methodologies, Part II basically required QA agencies to check how higher education institutions had implemented Part I, and in Part III required the QA agencies to be regularly reviewed themselves. The external reviews for ‘substantial compliance’ with the ESG were used simultaneously to decide about an agency’s membership in ENQA3 and for registration in the books of the European Quality Assurance Register (EQAR). EQAR was called into existence by the Bologna Process as an agency to provide transparency about credible QA agencies operating anywhere in Europe. This would enable an open market for QA, as an element in the open European area for higher education already envisaged when the EU established ENQA. The ESG are the culmination of the methodological cooperation among quality assessment agencies that started with EU the pilot projects in the early 1990s. It seems ironic that the methodological cooperation never went much beyond establishing certain general principles: national coordinating agency—reliance on self-evaluation—focus on site visits—some form of public reporting (van Vught & Westerheijden, 1993). We might add that cooperation later extended to sharing international members of visiting committees but that is cooperation at the operational level rather than at the level of common methodologies. It was, for example, never agreed to focus on institutional reviews rather than on programme accreditation, or the other way around. In fact, the ESG are not so much about methodology but about setting standards for what QA ought to include. In Power’s (1997) terms, the intention to focus on technological elements turned into a programmatic focus due to incompatibilities at the technological level. In the reviews of QA agencies ‘substantial compliance’ is the term used in the ESG: it indicates programmatic agreement yet leaves room for national diversity in the (technical) methods employed. In a culinary metaphor also used by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011), it appeared impossible to agree on a common menu, its ingredients and preparation so that the agreement became to set standards of ‘good practice’ for cooking. The formulation of the ESG has been called a major achievement of the Bologna Process (ENQA, ESU, EUA, & EURASHE, 2012; Westerheijden et al., 2010), as it showed consensus among major stakeholders at the European level. New ideas were introduced to QA in the EHEA. The first standard declares, for example, that higher education institutions must have a QA policy that ‘should also include a role for students and other stakeholders’ (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, 2005, p. 6). Setting this norm might lead to content-related changes in education as the balance of power over curriculum development and review is changed. As regards the inclusion of students, ESU’s influence is visible again balanced by the more NPM-based view that ‘other stakeholders’ should also play a role, in particular employers. Second, standard 3 concerns student assessment and its further guideline sets new norms: ‘Student assessment procedures are expected to be designed to measure the achievement of the intended learning outcomes. . .’ (European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education, 2005, p. 17). Taken seriously, this would require a complete overhaul of how students’ examinations take place in the large majority of higher education institutions across the EHEA. Defining intended learning outcomes for curricula (mentioned in Standard 2) may be dealt with as a paper exercise, however designing assessments that actually test whether students have achieved those outcomes would be a major change for higher education institutions. The whole idea of learning outcomes is also more easily applied in an instrumental view on higher education curricula leading to technical, testable competencies than in a Humboldtian understanding of teaching and learning as a process aimed at ‘Bildung’, i.e. a broad academic education. Obviously, the ESG’s apparently procedural set of norms mirrors the drafting actors’ preferences in the conception of higher education and has consequences for educational content. In the usual mode of policy-making in the Bologna Process, it was primarily a task for the national authorities to ensure that the ESG were implemented in their national QA systems, and it is quite another question how this European consensus influenced QA practices. Overall, this question was answered surprisingly self-contradictory by the relevant agencies themselves: ‘the ESG are widely accepted and adopted but . . . the challenge lies in the

3

In the Bologna Process, ENQA expanded from EU membership to membership for all quality assessment agencies in the EHEA countries.

174

J. Enders, D.F. Westerheijden / Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176

implementation’ (ENQA et al., 2012, p. 21). The latter observation was confirmed in a comparative study, which concluded that in the ‘implementation staircase’ between European-level (compromise) texts and QA practice in higher education institutions considerable slippage occurred. In the process of implementation national contexts were probably the most important ‘step’ introducing differences of implementation of the ESG across Europe (Kohoutek & Westerheijden, 2014). The study also found that the implementation staircase differed among countries. Where national QA frameworks were developed more strongly, knowledge of the ESG seemed to be less developed within the higher education institutions, and vice versa, in countries with less-developed national QA frameworks higher education institutions were more knowledgeable about the ESG. Both routes could lead to similar levels of implementation of the elements mentioned in Part I of the ESG; in the former case participants ascribed the new rules and practices to national frameworks, in the latter case they would be aware of the ESG as the source of the requirements. Institutional and national level implementation of the ESG seemed to be communicating vats. At the moment of writing our article, ENQA, EUA, EURASHE and ESU have developed a revised set of ESG for adoption by the Ministers in the EHEA in 2015. However, the revision is largely technical: the principles remain very similar to the first version, and the main aim of the revision is to increase clarity of the norms in the text to reduce interpretation differences, and thus to increase harmonisation of QA operations across the EHEA. There can be no doubt that the Bologna Process has been a motor of QA reforms across Europe while much more attention has so far been paid to the programme of political reform than to substantial goal achievements. In other words, the means for reform (and their achievement) have tended to become goals in themselves. One of the major recommendations by Westerheijden et al. (2010:9) stresses this point: ‘‘Attention in the second decade of the Bologna Process needs to turn to the achievement of the substantive, strategic goals more than to further refinement of the architecture’’. 5. Conclusions The Bologna Process stands out as one of the biggest and challenging real-life experiments of political reform in international education, and the Bologna story is not yet over. As we have shown, the dynamics of Bologna as a success story of European policy-making in higher education and the emergence and rise of European QA policies can best be understood by looking at multi-level and multi-actor politics. It all began with horizontal inter-governmental coordination by three continental governments (of Germany, France and Italy) that were concerned about national reform while being inspired by previous internationalisation policies at the EU-level and the role model of the UK. Interest in national reforms as well as the fear of being left behind made ever more countries join Bologna based on the assumption of participating in a non-binding, voluntary inter-governmental political process that would keep hierarchical integration by the EU at arms’ length. Very soon Bologna provided, however, a window of opportunity for regulatory capture by European policymakers who attempted to link the Process to the more economically driven processes of vertical integration within the EU. The EC in search of authority in the field of higher education provided grounds for the idea that QA is an issue for European education and European labour markets, and that Europe is an appropriate level for policy-making in this field. Coercive power within these processes was on the one hand exerted by the peer pressures of the Open Method of Coordination within the EU, and on the other by the move of Bologna from voluntary participation to monitored coordination. European QA became integrated into a system of reporting, benchmarking, and stocktaking that signalled a competitive turn in the political management of the Process. This competitive turn is also reflected in the ideational changes or ‘discursive turns’ around QA and the Bologna Process as regards the social re-construction of the role higher education is expected to fulfil within society and economy. Early documents already made some reference to what soon would become the well-known discourse around ‘the role of higher education for competitive advantage in the global knowledge economy’. Such notions were, however, carefully balanced with a discourse that celebrated the role of higher education for national cultures and identities as well as for the public good. With the emerging world-wide discourse around globalization, the knowledge economy, and international competition an instrumental view on higher education gained in prominence and also underpinned the argument about the need for QA in European higher education. QA was the obvious tool in this view to refocus, modernise and harmonize higher education provision and curricula for the new requirements of international mobility and employability, of transparency and accountability, and of strengthening Europe in the competitive world-order. Together with the action lines focusing on degree reform and recognition of degrees across countries, achieving

J. Enders, D.F. Westerheijden / Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176

175

cooperation and harmonization in QA gained in priority and fuelled further attempts for soft norm-setting and standardisation in European higher education. In consequence, QA as part of the Bologna Process developed an impressive organisational architecture and programmatic instrumentation for European convergence. The implementation and technical instrumentation is, however, left to the national and institutional level. In consequence, many differences in terms of timing, scope, and depth in national and institutional policies responding to the Bologna Process can be observed. Bologna is no stranger to problems of policy implementation including the institutional hypocrisy of talk, decision, and action; the distortion of the agenda in a long and multilayered implementation chain; and the translation and transformation of European policies in manifold national and institutional contexts. Such problems in the ‘implementation staircase’ were and are acute given the international multi-level and multi-actor character of the Process and the dominant role of national preferences and capabilities in the selective interpretation of Bologna for national policy agendas. The architecture of the house of QA in Bologna is impressive while it leaves many rooms for interpretive interior design. References Attali, J. (1998). Pour un mode`le europe´en d’enseignement supe´rieur s.l.: Paris. Baumgartner, F. R., & Jones, B. D. (1993). Agendas and instability in American politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Carroll, L. (1981). The annotated alice. (M. Gardner, Trans.) Penguin: Harmondsworth. de Wit, H. (2002). Internationalization of higher education in the United States of America and Europe: A historical comparative and conceptual analysis. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Enders, J. (2004). Higher education, internationalisation, and the nation-state: Recent developments and challenges for governance theory. Higher Education, 47(3), 361–382. Enders, J. (2010). Political science and educational research: Windows of opportunity for a neglected relationship. In A. Jakobi, K. Martens, & K. Wolf (Eds.), Education in political science: Discovering a neglected field (pp. 205–217). London and New York: Routledge/ECPR Studies in European Political Science. Enders, J., & Westerheijden, D. F. (2011). The Bologna Process: From the national to the regional to the global and back. In R. King, S. Marginson, & R. Naidoo (Eds.), Handbook on globalization and higher education (pp. 469–484). Cheltenham/Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. ENQA, ESU, EUA, & EURASHE, (2012). Mapping the implementation and application of the ESG (MAP-ESG Project): Final report of the project Steering Group. Brussels: European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA). European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education. (2005). Standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the European higher education area. Helsinki: European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education. European Ministers Responsible for Higher Education. (1999). Joint declaration of the European Ministers of Education Convened in Bologna on the 19th of June 1999 Bologna. Ferlie, E., Musselin, C., & Andresani, G. (2008). The ‘steering’ of higher education systems: A public management perspective. Higher Education, 56, 325–348. Finnemore, M. (1996). National interests in international society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fisher, F. (2003). Reframing public policy: Discursive politics and deliberative practices. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ˚ . (2005). Coordinating policies for a ‘‘Europe of knowledge’’ – Emerging practices of the ‘‘Open Method of Coordination’’ in education Gornitzka, A and research. Oslo: ARENA. Kent. (2008). Penelope law of the European union (4th ed.). Edinburgh: Pearson Education. Kern, B. (1998). A European union perspective on follow up. In J. P. Scheele, P. M. A. Maassen, & D. F. Westerheijden (Eds.), To be continued. . .: Follow-up of quality assurance in higher education (pp. 39–63). Maarssen: Elsevier/De Tijdstroom. Kohoutek, J., & Westerheijden, D. F. (2014). Opening up the black box: Drivers and barriers in institutional implementation of the European standards and guidelines. In H. Eggins (Ed.), Drivers and barriers to achieving quality in higher education (pp. 167–175). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Management Group. (1995). European pilot project for the evaluation of quality in higher education: European report. Brussels: European Commission, DG XXII ‘Education, Training and Youth’. Martens, K., & Wolf, K. (2009). Boomerangs and Trojan horses: The unintended consequences of internationalizing education policy through the EU and OECD. In A. Amaral, G. Neave, C. Musselin, & P. Maassen (Eds.), European integration and the governance of higher education and research (pp. 81–108). Dordrecht: Springer. Ministers in charge for France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. (1998). Sorbonne Joint Declaration: Joint declaration on harmonisation of the architecture of the European higher education system. Paris: The Sorbonne. Neave, G. (1994). The politics of quality: Developments in higher education in Western Europe 1992–1994. European Journal of Education, 29(2), 115–133. Neave, G. (1998). The evaluative state reconsidered. European Journal of Education, 33(3), 265–284. Pertek, J., & Soverovski, M. (Eds.). (1992). EC competences and programmes within the field of education/Compe´tences et programmes communautaires en matie`re d’e´ducation. Maastricht: European Institute of Public Administration. Pollitt, C., & Bouckaert, G. (2011). Public management reform: A comparative analysis: New public management, governance, and the neoWeberian state (3rd rev. and upd. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

176

J. Enders, D.F. Westerheijden / Policy and Society 33 (2014) 167–176

Power, M. (1997). The audit society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radaelli, C. (2005). Diffusion without convergence: How political context shapes the adoption of regulatory impact assessment. Journal of European Public Policy, 12(5), 924–943. Ravinet, P. (2008). From voluntary participation to monitored coordination: Why European countries feel increasingly bound by their commitment to the Bologna Process. European Journal of Education, 43(3), 353–367. Room, G. (2000). Globalisation, social policy and international standard-setting: The case of higher education credentials. International Journal of Social Welfare, 9, 103–119. Schwarz, S., & Westerheijden, D. F. (2004). Accreditation in the framework of evaluation activities: A comparative study in the European higher education area. In S. Schwarz & D. F. Westerheijden (Eds.), Accreditation and evaluation in the European higher education area (pp. 1–41). Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht. Stone, D. (1997). Policy paradox: The art of political decision making. New York: Norton. van Vught, F. A. (Ed.). (1989). Governmental strategies and innovation in higher education. London: Jessica Kingsley. van Vught, F. A., van der Wende, M. C., & Westerheijden, D. F. (2002). Globalization and internationalization: Policy agendas compared. In J. Enders & O. Fulton (Eds.), Higher education in a globalizing world. International trends and mutual observations (pp. 103–120). Dordrecht: Kluwer. van Vught, F. A., & Westerheijden, D. F. (1993). Quality management and quality assurance in european higher education: Methods and mechanisms. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the Commission of the European Communities. Westerheijden, D. F., Beerkens, E., Cremonini, L., Huisman, J., Kehm, B., Kovac, A., et al. (2010). The first decade of working on the European Higher Education Area: The Bologna Process Independent Assessment – Volume 1. Detailed assessment report. Brussels: European Commission, Directorate-General for Education and Culture. Westerheijden, D. F., & Leegwater, M. (Eds.). (2003). Working on the European Dimension of Quality: Report of the conference on quality assurance in higher education as part of the Bologna process, Amsterdam, 12–13 March 2002. Zoetermeer: Ministerie van Onderwijs, Cultuur en Wetenschappen. Witte, J. (2006). Change of degrees and degrees of change: Comparing adaptations of European higher education systems in the context of the Bologna Process. Enschede: Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente.