Success by Necessity? Educational Partnerships Between Individual Initiatives and Institutional Frameworks

Abstract

The Bologna process has structured and established a higher education arena, and can be seen as a platform for educational cooperation and regional building. The process has also facilitated collaboration across the former “iron curtain”, and this chapter addresses educational cooperation in the Barents region, between the northern part of Norway and the northwestern part of Russia. Educational collaboration between these two countries are not only about economic and academic development, but also about people-to-people relations, foreign policy, diplomacy and soft power. It is within the ramifications provided by the combination of international, national and local contexts and pressures that internationalization and practical collaboration are invented, developed and maintained. International cooperation in higher education often take the form of partnerships, and here we adopt a partnership perspective as the point of departure for analysing the collaborative efforts, their establishment, and how they play out within the institutional frameworks. The chapter apply interdependency as a core concept, and the development of the four studied partnerships are largely explained by Norwegian economic incentives and a strong drive towards internationalization in both countries’ higher educational institutions and systems.