Steering through the Peripheries: Higher Education Reforms in Kazakhstan

• In Event: Reforms, sustainable development, and social change in higher education (I)

Proposal

Background
During the Soviet era, higher education was subject to strict control from Moscow and was heavily influenced by centralised state planning. As a result, research activities were removed from universities, where a teacher-centred approach was adopted, and a top-down bureaucratic governance model prevailed. As the sole decision-maker, the Minister of Education wielded absolute control over subordinates (Yakavets, 2017, 459). This gave rise to numerous protests in higher education institutions, reflecting the challenges and discontent experienced by students and academics under the authoritarian regime. These protests took place during the so-called Leningrad Affair (1950), in the 1968 Red Square Protests, and the Moscow Protests of 1987.
Overall, the dissent called for political and social reforms, greater freedom of speech, and an end to corruption and oppressive regime. The Soviet authorities repressed these protests, thus contributing to shaping public opinion’s desire for change.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Perestroika (restructuring) and Glasnost (openness) policies enacted by Mikhail Gorbachev resulted in increased political and social freedoms. This led to widespread protests across higher education institutions in the Soviet Union, as students and academics seized the opportunity to voice their grievances and advocate for further reforms. These protests played a crucial role in shaping public consciousness and laying the foundation for the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Powell, 2011).

The case
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, member countries gained independence and sought to adopt educational practices from the West (Silova, 2010) in an attempt to break away from the Soviet model. Among the five former Central Asian republics in the USSR, Kazakhstan is the only country that joined the European Higher Education Area (2010) and implemented the Bologna Process reforms. Successive reforms of the higher education system have been implemented seeking to enhance the transition from a centralised model controlled by the Ministry of Education and Science towards a market-driven structure that allows for greater institutional autonomy and system diversity. However, despite the various governments’ efforts over the years, the Kazakh higher education system has proven difficult to reform and has remained rather bureaucratic and rigid. Overall, decision-making structures and processes lack academic involvement on the one hand, and transparency on the other. The persistent limited institutional autonomy has led to reduced motivation and commitment among academics in public institutions.
In 2018, in the attempt to extending institutional autonomy and improving universities’ governance, the government of Kazakhstan introduced a new law, whose main objective was to grant academic and institutional autonomy to the 29 public universities by creating independent governing bodies with decision-making powers. The Law was expected to enable institutional flexibility and establish an accountability system through the new governing boards. Universities have received increased powers to determine students’ admission procedures, recruiting academic faculty, as well as define the qualification requirements for academic appointments. In addition, universities have been granted the right to establish branches abroad. They have also been given power to set up endowment funds, create start-up companies, and attract additional financial and material resources to implement their statutory activities. Finally and importantly, public universities have been allowed to determine the content of their education programmes.
Overall, the 2018 Law has transformed the governance structure of public universities by extending their institutional autonomy unevenly across the sector. Somewhat surprisingly, the largest, wealthiest, research-intensive universities (National Research Universities) located in the main cities of Kazakhstan, have been lagging behind in the adoption and implementation of the increased institutional autonomy.

Objectives and research design
Against this backdrop, the study's main objective is to understand the factors allowing the implementation of the 2018 reform in higher education in Kazakhstan . We analyse how different types of public universities responded to, implemented and experienced the new governance model. Our analytical framework is based on the literature on reforms of higher education and of the public sector (Fumasoli et al 2020, Verhoest et al 2004, Estermann et al 2020). Accordingly, we hypothesise that 1) organisational age and size; 2) institutional type and mission; 3) distribution of resources; 4) geographical, economic and political centrality; 5) organisational identities affect the implementation of reforms in higher education. To achieve this, we conducted 46 semi-structured interviews with rectors, vice-rectors, department directors, and academic faculty in six universities including National Research Universities, Research Universities, and Universities in the main cities and in the regions. To triangulate our data, we analysed official legal documents such as the Law and its related by-laws and universities’ policy documents, e.g., strategic plans, annual reports, and meeting minutes. Finally, we used national statistical data to compare universities' evolution over time before and after the 2018 reform.

Preliminary findings
Our empirical study reveals variations in the implementation of the governance reform at the organisational level. Interestingly, the successful implementation of the reform was not contingent upon university age and size, types and missions, research activities, funding, or geographical location. Instead, it was correlated with the active engagement of university leaders in the policymaking process at the governmental level. Based on our analysis, the main factors affecting the reform implementation among universities are 1) the involvement of institutional actors in policy-making activities at the national level; 2) related, the role played by the central government in designing the consultations for the reform 3) the importance of the national political context beyond the higher education sector 4) actors’ strategic agency to pursue their distinctive political agendas.

Authors

• Dinara Sultan, University College London UCL

• Tatiana Fumasoli, University College London UCL