Learning by the market: regulatory regionalism, Bologna, and accountability communities

Abstract

Over the last two decades institutions of higher education have been subject to new modes of regulatory governance. This essay applies a ‘regulatory lens’ to higher education governance with a view to understanding the sometimes contradictory relationship between the globalisation and regionalisation of higher education and the transformation of the public university. We use the Bologna Process to examine how new regional modes of higher education regulation are creating new forms of ‘publicness’ that are reshaping the scope, nature and form of public universities. The question posed is: What is the nature of the public good – and the public – in these new regulatory modes of higher education governance? Here, the concept of accountability communities is used to examine the way in which legitimacy is shaped, created and contested within these new modes of governance. Legitimacy secured through accountability communities facilitates membership of a functionally specific regulatory regime as well as the identification and location of public authority.