Internationalization of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation: the case of BRICS

• In Event: Dinámicas y mutaciones en las políticas universitarias de América Latina: promoción, evaluación e internacionalización de la Investigación y los Posgrados

Abstract

Higher Education and Science and Tecnhology internazionalization is a strong contemporary trend worldwide. Regional agreements of integration -or other processus linked with the former- are levels of special interest in order to understand the dynamics of that trend.
Some of these regional agreements include some special actors, like some leading and emergent states which participate as well in inter-regional alliances, like BRICS countries.
Since 2009, the bloc integrated by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa became an important actor regarding global governance. Besides their weight in ecomomic and political terms, the bloc is as well a very important space for financial, technical and scientific cooperation.

BRICS has been celebrating several meetings of their Foreign Ministers and Summits of the Heads of State, including in the agenda subjects linked with Science, technology and innovation (ST&I). Matters that generally in the past were a subject reserved to international organizations (like UNESCO or the OECD) in charge of developong world wide accepted international agendas.

The new relevance of BRICS even in terms of the building of a Knowledge Society lyes in two main pillars: on one hand, the national agenda of transformations taking place in many or all of the BRICS members; on the other hand, in the capacity of these coutries to cooperate among them in order to become a key actor of the internazionalization of Higher Education, ST&I.

The paper analyze those two pillars, by describing the main trends of Higher Education and STI agenda in the member states and analyzing the agreements among BRICS regarding these issues.

Authors

• Enrique Daniel Martinez Larrechea, Instituto Universitario CLAEH-Uruguay

• Adriana M Chiancone, Instituto Universitario CLAEH-Uruguay