Transnational Strategic Partnerships in Higher Education: The European Universities Initiative as the ‘next level of cooperation’?

• In Event: National, Transnational & Global University Collaborations and Interdisciplinary

Proposal

National and international strategic partnerships in European higher education (HE) have become a growing phenomenon, as recognized in university-industry relations, branch campuses, or inter-university projects to enhance cooperation and collaboration in teaching and research production. The European Union policy initiatives under the European Higher Education Area certainly contributed to such a development within Europe.

However, while HE scholarship has studied national and international strategic partnerships, less attention has been paid to transnational ones. The latter refers to strategic partnerships that surpass and cut across national and single-organizational boundaries (despite their capacity to impact local and national levels) to build transnational structures. The European Universities Initiative (EUI), created by the European Commission in 2017, is a recent novel phenomenon within the European Union policy toolkit with an explicit transnational dimension for European HE. Thus, it aims at strengthening transnational strategic partnerships in European HE through the establishment of several European Universities by 2024. The policy initiative intends to achieve this ambition through the creation of bottom‐up networks of universities that will enable students to obtain combined degrees in several EU countries, foster research collaboration, and enhance the competitiveness of European universities. To date, the EUI counts 44 European university alliances, involving around 340 HE institutions (HEI).

We argue that the EUI, as a new transnational governance mechanism, can be seen as a significant structural reform for European HE whose impacts are yet to be explored. Given its recent design and implementation, the paper charts the institutional features of the EUI aimed at fostering transnational strategic partnerships within European HE. We thus address the following question: what are the main regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutional dimensions of the EUI as a new transnational governance mechanism?

Theoretically, the paper is anchored in new institutionalism and applies the three institutional dimensions (related to rules, standards, and ideas respectively) to analyze the EUI as a transnational governance mechanism both at the European policy and at the organizational levels. Methodologically, the paper is supported by a qualitative approach. At the European policy level, we analyze semi-structured interviews with European policy-makers and the EUI’s official policy documents. At the organizational level, we analyze the strategic documents of the entire population of transnational strategic partnerships funded before 2022 supported by the EUI (n=41). Our neo-institutionalist analysis finds that the EUI appears as a ‘next level of cooperation’ in European HE since it aims to transform European cooperation from an international to a transnational-oriented regulatory framework (regulative), to create and diffuse a new model for European HE following a challenge-based approach (normative), and to work as a way to reinforce and institutionalize European and global scripts for European HE (cultural-cognitive).

Author

• Marcelo Marques, University of Luxembourg