Studying the Relation Between Stakeholder Input and Higher Education Policy

The study describes a key feature of modern, democratic policy making, namely the relation between stakeholder input and policy output. In the Nordic countries, there are long traditions for and democratic values attached to the dialogue between the government and civil society when developing policies for the educational sector. The case presented here is the hearing process held by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research in 2017 prior to the launch of a white paper on quality culture in higher education. The potential coherence between input by stakeholder groups and the quality measures proposed in the white paper is investigated. The theoretical framework comprises the concept of ‘uploading’ borrowed from research on EU policy making and discursive institutionalism to analyse the representation of input by stakeholder groups when they attempt to ‘upload’ their priorities into the white paper. The methodological approach is content analysis of the hearing responses and the white paper. The findings show that stakeholders from the higher education sector and employer groups had a higher degree of coherence with the proposed measures in the white paper, and universities and colleges had a lower degree of input that was represented.