Giliberto Capano - The Governance Mantra in Higher Education Policies: Ideas and Instruments

Prof. Giliberto Capano, The Governance Mantra in Higher Education Policies: Ideas and Instruments. March 30th, 2022. ------------------- Governance in higher education has undergone substantial shifts in recent decades. It has been a long process of reforms of the ideas and policy instruments adopted to push universities towards behaving in a strategic way and thus to be more accountable to the socio-economic. These reforms have been assessed in different ways, such as by emphasizing the shift to the more supervisory role of the State, the increasing privatization and marketization following the neoliberal paradigm, or the overall process of re-regulation. Thus the landscape of systemic and institutional governance is significantly changed although it is not completely clear whether and how the expected goals have been completely reached, while it emerges that the actual situation is characterized by a prevailing mix of ideas and instruments. ------------------- Giliberto Capano is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Bologna, Italy. He has been the director of the Italian Centre for Research on Universities and Higher Education Systems (2015-2021) and is the editor of Policy & Society. He specializes in public administration, public policy analysis, and comparative higher education. His research focuses on governance dynamics and performance in higher education and education, policy design and policy change, policy instruments’ impact, the social role of political science, the policy impact of Covid-19, and leadership as an embedded function of policymaking. His recent books are: Changing Governance in Universities: Italian Higher Education in Comparative Perspective (co-authored with M. Regini and M. Turri; Palgrave, 2016); A modern Guide to Public Policy (co-edited with M. Howlett, Edward Elgar, 2020); Convergence and Diversity in the Governance of Higher Education (co-edited with D. Jarvis, Cambridge University Press, 2020).