Digital Transformation and higher education governance in Pakistan

• In Event: Digital empowerment and transformation

Proposal

CIES 2025 encourages us to envision education in a ‘digital society.’ The use of digital technologies and AI to enhance teaching and learning, as well as administration and governance at institutional, provincial and state levels are seen as imperative to improving access to quality education, especially following the COVID-19 experience. However, a ‘digital society’ cannot be taken for granted in much of the global south, where lack of infrastructure, poverty and other factors have made the process of digitisation uneven. In such contexts, the capacity of governments and educational institutions to adopt, adapt and effectively utilise such technologies are mediated by a range of structural, economic, political and cultural factors, reflected in a long history of failed reforms.
Several reforms have been instituted in Pakistan by successive governments to improve the quality of university governance. However, the failure of many of these policies raises the question of why reform attempts have remained unsuccessful even in the era of digital governance (Taiyeb, 2019). Several reports and studies have focused on such issues as corruption and lack of political will as explanations for policy failures. However, understanding the challenges to the adoption of digital technologies requires more fine-grained as well as multi-level empirical exploration that is also sensitive to complex institutional settings (Meyer, Ramirez, Frank, & Schofer, 2007; Ragnedda & Gladkova, 2020; on neo-institutionalism, see exemplary Rhodes, Binder, & Rockman, 2008).
Responding to this call, this paper presents the findings of a study of higher education in Pakistan. It explores how multilevel power structures of governance, institutional norms, regulations, and cultural factors mediated engagement with digital technologies introduced to improve the quality of governance and education as a whole. The empirical sites included three public universities and the federal and provincial departments which govern universities in Pakistan. Fifty-one key actors, including individual academics, university administrators, parliamentarians, policy analysts and bureaucrats were interviewed and key documents, including national and institutional policies and government directives were analysed. Theoretical concepts of neo-institutional theory such as isomorphism, coupling and legitimacy-seeking provided key resources to analyse the factors that enabled or constrained the adoption of reforms.
The findings detail how a conventional power structure and a bureaucratic culture of governance impact service delivery and marginalise key stakeholders, including students and staff. Across the selected universities, administrative structures, bureaucratic cultures and well-established institutional practice cultures proved to be interlocked, posing both expected and unexpected challenges even where there was political or professional will to adopt new technologies. Different parts of the institutional machinery in higher education and its governance in Pakistan thus seem to operate at cross purposes. Pakistan’s conventional governance structure, influenced by local institutional dynamics, apparently resists technological change in governance. Yet, strong normative pressure pushes actors to follow the practices of digitalisation in the global north to gain global legitimacy and competitiveness.
The paper presents a fine-grained, multi-level analysis of the views, experiences and practices of different stakeholders and underscoring the complexity of implementing change into Pakistani Universities. As a result, it contributes to the literature on the challenges of improving higher-education quality in the global south, especially regarding digitisation. The findings enable the development of recommendations for the establishment of support structures that respond to specific barriers identified in the empirical work. Given the push for digitisation of education as a panacea for the global south, the nuanced account presented here points to the need for more careful and considered reforms across multiple sites for successful adoption of digital technologies. Moreover, it is not only relevant to Pakistan, but has lessons for the global south more generally. Policy changes alone are not adequate, nor are institutional directives. Changing social and institutional cultures takes time, and strong infrastructural resources need to be developed. Furthermore, none of these changes can succeed unless digital resources become much more widely accessible across the nation, and in particular to universities, their stakeholders and, not least, students.

Authors

• Mehr Mohsin Raza, Deakin University

• Jared Sonnicksen, RWTH Aachen University

• Radhika Gorur, Deakin University