Understanding How and Why Policy Design can Matter: The Case of Governance Reforms in Higher Education in Comparative Perspective

In the past 3 decades, all European HE systems have been exposed to the mantra of reforming governance in higher education. European governments’ HE policies have attempted to converge toward a common template of systemic governance. The so-named “steering at the distance” model. The basic policy tools of this strategy consist of institutional autonomy, new competitive funding mechanisms, and the assessment of the quality of research and teaching. In order to pursue this strategy, most European governments have tried to re-design both the governance arrangements in their universities and the systemic governance dynamics. It has been a complex and demanding process in which policy design has been at the centre of the governmental efforts. Some governments have been more capable than others to be effective in this effort, thus producing genuine effective and successful policy design. Other governments have been more capable and thus they have produce weak policy design or even non-design. The paper focuses on the comparison of the policy design in higher education diachronically pursued in four countries (France, Italy, England and The Netherlands) to show and understand how and why policy design can be effectively reached, that is that policy formulation can be genuinely based on the gathering of knowledge of the effects of policy tool use on policy targets and its application to the development and implementation of policies aimed at the attainment of specific desired policy outcomes and ambitions. As the paper will show, similar policy instruments can produce different quality in policy design, as well different mixes of chosen instruments can produce similar design results. What finally will emerge is that good or bad policy design, although contingent driven, depends significantly upon the capacity of governments to open a design space for their actions.