Agency and change in challenging institutional contexts: The role of policy entrepreneurs in the internationalization of higher education

Focusing on higher education as a policy field, this paper explores the role of agency and individual entrepreneurs in the process of internationalization of universities, and the extent to which they successfully utilise available policy instruments to implement collaboration activities with other universities. Situating the article within the broader literature on policy change and policy entrepreneurs, the paper explains under which conditions policy entrepreneurs, and particularly academic staff and university leaders, are successful in pursuing internationalization strategies, such as partnerships, collaborative research projects, mobility exchanges. These questions are examined through a case study approach in institutional contexts that are challenging for higher education internationalization, namely Greece and Southern Italy. Despite a low degree of previous higher education internationalization in Greece, evidenced by inward student mobility below half of the EU average at the BA level and the country’s very low rank as a host of European Research Council grants, some Greek universities have recently developed far-reaching forms of research and education partnerships with top US universities such as Yale, Johns Hopkins, Indiana, and Michigan State University. These initiatives have been highlighted and further encouraged in the framework of the International Academic Partnership Program of the Greek Ministry of Education and the US Institute of International Education. Similarly, despite low degrees of previous higher education internationalization, particularly when it comes to collaborations with universities in the Middle East and North Africa region, the Sicilian regional authorities recently launched a programme to foster collaborations between local universities and universities in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan and Morocco. The programme utilises institutional and financial support provided at both the domestic and European levels. How did these international university collaborations materialise in institutionally challenging contexts with little previous experience with higher education internationalization? Using a process-tracing approach, we show that two factors account for this success: individual leadership and macro-level policies that reduced the obstacles to higher education internationalization. On the one hand, the ideas and personal networks of individual academics and university leaders played a key role in catalysing some of the first and most innovative types of international university collaborations in the contexts in question. On the other hand, higher education policy instruments reduced some of the obstacles to the implementation of international collaborative activities among universities by providing funding, updating the relevant legal framework, and supporting the scale-up of individual collaborations. By putting forward this argument, the paper contributes to the literature on the role of individual leadership in policy change as well as to the nascent body of research on the internationalization of higher education. As such, we consider that it would be a good fit for the panel on "Shaping knowledge policies in a globalized world: actors, structures, and policymaking dynamics."