Policy Making by Dialogue?

In 2015 the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research launched its reform policy for future mergers in the public higher education sector through a white paper. The mergers would increase the number of Norwegian universities from 8 to 10, while reducing the number of state colleges from 12 to 6. This paper addresses the policy process through which the government developed a policy that motivated the institutions involved to undertake the mergers. The government emphasized two aspects of its merger policy: 1) The mergers were voluntary, bottom up decisions undertaken by the institutions themselves. 2) The institutions were highly involved in the process that led up to the decisions, and the formulation of the merger policy in the government white paper. If true, this claim indicates a new mode of policy formulation, that seems to depart from what has been common in Norway and in the Scandinavian corporatist tradition, involving a different set of actors and through different procedures. Thus, we ask if this may signal a new trend within the higher education policy sector, or alternatively, whether the government by making the claim focused on one phase or one aspect of the policy making process in order to strengthen its legitimacy. In this paper our aim is to clarify this issue. We will first outline different HE Policy making styles where we distinguish between four different styles or modes of policy making: parliamentary, corporatist, expert and dialogue-oriented policy making modes. The different modes may be identified depending on which actors are engaged in the policy making process, the organizational forms through which they are engaged and how the process is legitimized in terms of democratic values. The modes of policy making are based on well-established strands of literatures on democratic policy making. Here we distinguish between such modes depending on three characteristics: 1) what actors are considered crucial to the policy making process, 2) characteristics of the policy process and 3) the underlying notion of representation they are based on. Based on interviews with ministry officials and institutional leaders involved, we shall investigate in the empirical part the extent to which the emerging mode of dialogue-oriented policy making presented by the government also is mirrored by the perceptions of institutional leaders or whether more traditional modes of policy making were perceived as important to the outcome. Then we shall discuss the broader potential implications of the emerging mode, how it may affect other and more traditional modes, through what institutional change mechanisms dialogue-oriented policy making has emerged, and how it my change dominant contemporary perceptions of democratic decision processes. Finally, we point out that dialogue-oriented policy as a mode of policy making, in the version we observed, focuses on the relationship between central government and institutional leaders. Thus, one possible implication is that this mode of dialogue-oriented policy making may contribute to strengthening the position of institutional leaders, and add strength to the tendency of stronger institutional leadership and managerial hierarchies in academic institutions.