Globalisation, Societies and Education

ISSN: 1476-7724 (Print) 1476-7732 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cgse20

Learning by the market: regulatory regionalism,

Bologna, and accountability communities

Kanishka Jayasuriya

To cite this article: Kanishka Jayasuriya (2010) Learning by the market: regulatory regionalism,
Bologna, and accountability communities, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 8:1, 7-22,
DOI: 10.1080/14767720903574009

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14767720903574009

Published online: 22 Feb 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 187

View related articles

Citing articles: 4 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cgse20

Download by: [University of Bristol] Date: 04 March 2016, At: 07:29

 Globalisation, Societies and Education
Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2010, 7–22

Learning by the market: regulatory regionalism, Bologna, and

accountability communities
Kanishka Jayasuriya*

University of Adelaide, Australia

Globalisation,
10.1080/14767720903574009
CGSE_A_457896.sgm
1476-7724
Original
Taylor
8102010
fafner100@gmail.com
KanishkaJayasuriya
00000March
and
&Article
Francis
(print)/1476-7732
Francis
2010
Societies
Ltd and Education
(online)

Over the last two decades institutions of higher education have been subject to
new modes of regulatory governance. This essay applies a ‘regulatory lens’ to
higher education governance with a view to understanding the sometimes
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

contradictory relationship between the globalisation and regionalisation of higher

education and the transformation of the public university. We use the Bologna
Process to examine how new regional modes of higher education regulation are
creating new forms of ‘publicness’ that are reshaping the scope, nature and form
of public universities. The question posed is: What is the nature of the public good
– and the public – in these new regulatory modes of higher education governance?
Here, the concept of accountability communities is used to examine the way in
which legitimacy is shaped, created and contested within these new modes of
governance. Legitimacy secured through accountability communities facilitates
membership of a functionally specific regulatory regime as well as the
identification and location of public authority.
Keywords: regulatory regionalism; accountability; Bologna Process; regulation;
public university; knowledge economies

Introduction
For those of us who work in universities, now familiar terms like ‘networks’, ‘partner-
ships’ and ‘hubs’ indicate a transformed workplace and its broader regulatory context.
A key exemplar of this change is that the governance of higher education has become
less national and more global and regional, thereby constituting new scalar regimes
(Robertson 2007).1 This essay uses a ‘regulatory lens’ to analyse the nature and
dynamics of these new spaces of higher education governance in order to place under
the microscope the relationship between the regionalisation of higher education and
the resultant transformation of the public university. We argue that these new spaces
of governance – that we identify as regulatory regionalism – are not above the state;
rather, they are located in regional spaces of the state, which overlap with national,
political and policy-making regimes.
The regulatory regionalism approach to new modes of regional governance as a
process of internal transformation creates the appearance of regional frontiers within
the state by creating ‘regulatory spaces of the state’, and for this reason this production
of scale should be more accurately described – as Robertson argues in this volume –
as a form of ‘state regulatory regionalism’. Regional governance is not an agglomer-
ation of national, territorial and political units at a higher regional level; it is a more

*Email: fafner100@gmail.com

ISSN 1476-7724 print/ISSN 1476-7732 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14767720903574009
http://www.informaworld.com
 8 K. Jayasuriya

fundamental regionalisation of social and economic governance (Jayasuriya 2008b).

In Europe, what has come to be known as the Bologna Process is an exemplar of the
regional regulation of higher education. The Bologna Process is a:

… recognition that in spite of their valuable differences, European higher education

systems are facing common internal and external challenges related to the growth and
diversification of higher education, the employability of graduates, the shortage of skills
in key areas, the expansion of private and transnational education, etc. The Declaration
recognises the value of coordinated reforms, compatible systems and common action.
(Bologna Declaration 1999, 3)

Its objective is to construct a European higher education regulatory system that

extends well beyond the formal boundaries of the EU. This governance is a modular
process of regulation – informal and flexible – that enables different national systems
of higher education to advance ‘mobility’ within the EU and helps to create a more
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

knowledge-intensive economy.2
As a regulatory regime the Bologna Process brings together a diverse array of
public and private actors in the regulation of European higher education. However, it
is not the private or public actors per se that are important but the relationship between
private and public actors in new governance settings. These new formations of public
and private authority are central to emerging forms of mechanisms of political gover-
nance as well as to providing legitimacy to new modes of regional higher education
governance. We examine this transformation and relocation of public authority
through the conceptual framework of an ‘accountability community’. This framework
is discussed in more detail below, but in brief, accountability communities can be
defined as a institutional ensemble that brings together a diverse array of public and
private actors around specific practices and ideas of accountability that hold to
‘account’ the conduct of agents within a regulatory regime. In this way an account-
ability community defines the legitimacy of regulatory regimes, and provides the basis
on which new forms of state- and market-making are created. On this basis, account-
ability communities are central to the social production of the regional boundaries of
the state which are so central to the functioning of regulatory state regionalism.
In these contexts of state-making, accountability communities are important
because they help to determine practices and notions of ‘publicness’ within regional
regulatory regimes. This essay uses the term ‘publicness’ to highlight the fact that the
twin process of market reform and rescaling governance has made problematic the
taken for granted association between the public domain, the state and the nation
(Newman 2007).3 The Bologna Process exemplifies this ‘Westphalian’ and ‘Webe-
rian’ boundary crossing and novel processes of state-making, occurring through the
constitution of new domains of ‘public authority’. Regional mechanisms of higher
education governance such as the Bologna Process involve the creation of new scales
of governance as well as the ideological legitimation of these new modes of regulation
through forms and processes of accountability that serve to constitute publicness
within these regimes. This is a process that at root shapes new forms of public author-
ity, and in consequence questions of legitimacy loom large in this new regulatory
governance.4 Legitimating the exercise of public authority in these functionally
specific regulatory regimes is as important as citizenship in national territorial spaces.
In the case of the regional governance of higher education it reflects the emergence of
new relationships between professionals, higher education regulators, higher educa-
tion institutions and new practices of citizenship.
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 9

The rest of the essay is organised as follows: in the first section the conceptual
framework is set out and applied to the Bologna Process; the next section develops
this argument by examining how accountability communities challenge the implicit
assumption about the national citizenship boundaries of the public university by
enabling the creation of new forms of publicness; the third section takes a comprehen-
sive look at the entire regulatory chain by detailing how accountability communities
function as intermediaries within the broader Lisbon economic agenda. In conclusion,
the implications of our framework for the transformation of the nature and scope of
the public university are explored.

Accountability community and the politics of legitimacy

The specific objectives of the Bologna Process are to: (a) facilitate the comparability
of university degrees across Europe through the standardisation of degree and post-
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

graduate programs; (b) ensure a system of quality assurance across the European
higher education system; and (c) ensure mobility of students and academics across the
higher education spectrum (Bologna Declaration 1999). It is important to recognise
that this is a system of governance with a set of broad policy objectives operating
through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) of the EU (Veiga and Alberto
2006). The OMC is a policy mechanism used by the European Commission to estab-
lish policy coordination in areas under the jurisdiction of the national governments, or
where jurisdiction is shared with the European Union. It relies on a mix of soft law
that specifies broad policy objectives which are then accommodated within diverse
political and institutional settings of the EU. The use of these flexible methods for
educational governance:

… will have the effect of bringing about a re-division and rescaling of responsibility for
the existing functions of national education systems around an agenda that seeks to maxi-
mise the likelihood of their facilitation of, and minimizes the likelihood of their acting
as significant obstacles to, the development of the overall agenda of making Europe the
most competitive economy in the world. (Robertson and Dale 2006, 7)

In this sense this ‘Europeanisation’ of educational governance provides new

modes of governance that now stretch like a set of looms from the national to the
regional. However to view this as simply the internationalisation or the regionalisation
of education would obscure the most important facet of the OMC, which is that it is a
new scalar regime that governs the relationship between the regional, national and
sub-national levels. The term ‘regulatory regionalism’ captures the way in which these
new spaces of governance provide the basis for a new form of statehood, that creates
a semblance of regional frontiers within the state by transforming the ‘regulatory
space of the state’ in which political and economic governance takes place (Jayasuriya
2008b). Such new regional modes of governance work through the embedding and
incorporation of national-level political and bureaucratic institutions into regional
regulatory regimes.
To understand this relationship between regulatory governance and the transfor-
mation of public authority and legitimacy, this essay expands on the concept of an
accountability community developed in Jayasuriya (2008a). Accountability communi-
ties are complex, and composed of public and/or private organisations endowed with
capacities to perform legislative, monitoring and compliance activities in specific
functionally-based regulatory regimes within – and beyond – national boundaries.
 10 K. Jayasuriya

They operate through institutional forms such as deliberative forums, markets or

network mechanisms. Furthermore, by virtue of particular understandings of
discourses of accountability that bind various actors together, these communities
enable the location and identification of public authority – and the ‘public’ – to which
account is given within regulatory regimes (see Jayasuriya 2008a, 2008c). On this
definition, accountability communities are mechanisms of political rule that establish
boundaries, create political relationships and determine the allocation of resources.
This constitution of the public domain gives legitimacy to the regulatory regime.
This is especially important in decentred regulatory regimes that operate beyond
traditional bureaucratic or national boundaries as in such regimes where non-state
actors – accreditation and certification agencies as well as public agencies, etc. –
perform key public functions in regional governance in regulatory spaces such as Euro-
pean higher education. In the case of the Bologna Process, notions of quality and
accreditation are important policy instruments in building through which ideas and
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

practices of accountability allow the creation – though this may not always be success-
ful – of legitimacy and public authority inside a functionally specific, decentred regu-
latory regime. Their particular function of public legitimacy within regulatory
governance distinguishes accountability communities from concepts of epistemic or
policy communities used elsewhere in the literature. Consequently this system of
‘accountable governance’ delimits the legitimate boundaries of a regional regulatory
regime within the spaces of the ostensibly national policy-making institutions.
Yet, this formulation runs the risk of slipping into a form of methodological nation-
alism (Robertson and Dale 2006). If we are to avoid such pitfalls we need to acknowl-
edge that the new scalar governance enabled by devices such as the OMC is functionally
specific – that is in terms of policy – rather than a generic territorial jurisdiction. In
this sense it is an apt illustration of what Hooghe and Marks (2003) characterise as
‘Type 2 multilevel governance’. This is understood as a set of arrangements:

… in which jurisdictions are not just aligned on a few levels but operate at numerous
territorial scales, in which jurisdictions are task specific rather than general purpose and
where jurisdictions are intended to be flexible rather than durable. (Hooghe and Marks
2003, 237)

These Type 2 arrangements of which the Bologna Process is a good example then
represent not just a process of re-territorialisation but the creation of new spaces of
governance that are layered onto, but not necessarily co-extensive with, existing terri-
torial divisions. In this context, it is striking that the membership of the Bologna
Process does overlap but does not coincide with the boundaries of the EU.
In this regard the Bologna Process is but one part of the emerging regulatory
governance of higher education that is task-specific and crosses multiple jurisdictions.
Much of the scholarship on higher education – with notable exceptions such as
Robertson (2006), Robertson and Dale (2006), Mok (2008) and King (2006) – tends
to view recent transformations of higher education from the prism of either ‘academic
capitalism’ or economic innovation, rather than in terms of regulatory governance.
But, as this essay illustrates, the regional governance of higher education occurs
within purposely constructed regulatory spaces that are both flexible and modular,
lending itself to Type 2 multilevel governance.
Functioning as a node of legitimacy within the regulatory process, accountability
is inescapably a political process which: ‘allows us to see the relationship between
distinct accountability discourses and broader social, political, economic and legal
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 11

relations they are part of’ (Harrington and Turem 2006, 201). Framing accountability
as a form of political rule has the distinct advantage of identifying and analysing
developing forms of accountability and public law in terms of: ‘how it is understood,
shaped and ultimately mobilized as a powerful political symbol to legitimate a certain
type of regulatory regime’ (Harrington and Turem 2006, 201).
Choice of a particular accountability community reflects the strategic preference
of key actors in the following ways: it rules out alternative ways of conceiving
accountability; helps to mobilise and favour certain kinds of policy outcomes against
other outcomes; and enables the inclusion or marginalisation of private and public
actors. An implication of this argument is that accountability is a mechanism that can
be used to shift the actors as well as the scale on which governance takes place. Indeed
one of the intriguing developments in the redesigning of higher education is an
emphasis on accountability as the measurement of quality in mediating the relation-
ship between market forces and higher education institutions. This is readily apparent
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

in mechanisms such as the British Research Assessment Exercise as well as more

privately organised attempts to rank universities. It is these quality elements that have
become especially crucial in the regulation of European higher education. All the key
elements of the Bologna Process – such as standardisation of degrees or credit transfer
– have become significant in an emerging Europe-wide quality framework. Under the
Bologna Process the quality standards are threefold: (a) internal standards within the
institutions; (b) external scrutiny of internal standards; and (c) the development of
overarching standards for the external assessment of national quality assurance. The
importance of these ‘accountability’ measures is emphasised by Adelman (2008) who
notes that:

A qualifications framework is a statement of learning outcomes and competencies a

student must demonstrate for a degree at a specific level to be awarded. It is not a state-
ment of objectives or goals. It is not a wish list. It is a performance criterion. When an
institution of higher education is governed by a qualifications framework, it must
demonstrate that its students have demonstrated. (Adelman 2008, 6)

In fact, this is a reversal of the situation where the US is seen as the site of the best
higher education practices. Adelman goes on to laud the importance of these account-
ability measures for the reform of American higher education.
One reason why these quality frameworks and associated discourses of account-
ability have played such a crucial role is that these are means through which myriad
policy statements are translated into policy practices within the European higher
education system (Sultana 2002). However, these discourses take practical shape in
the accountability community, and grant legitimacy to the regulatory regime. With
respect to Bologna, the European Network of Quality Assurance in Education
(ENQA) was established in 1999. It recommends Europe-wide quality assurance
systems based on a set of common principles. In this way the quality assurance
systems represent the multi-level regulation characteristic of the Open Method of
Coordination (OMC). The 2005 meeting of Education Ministers underlined this focus
on quality assurance in their statement to:

… adopt the standards and guidelines for quality assurance in the European Higher
Education Area as proposed by ENQA. We commit ourselves to introducing the
proposed model for peer review of quality assurance agencies on a national basis, while
respecting the commonly accepted guidelines and criteria. We welcome the principle of
 12 K. Jayasuriya

a European register of quality assurance agencies based on national review. (Quoted in

ENQA 2007, 5)

The ENQA functions as a kind of meta-governance accountability community that

sets the benchmarks for various lower accountability communities within national
higher education systems. The point, however, is that these overarching accountability
communities form the basis for the operation of higher education regulatory governance.
For this reason it may be that Type 2 multilevel governance identified by Hooghe
and Marks (2003) does not adequately capture the nature of the Bologna Process as a
governance project. Unlike, say, the governance of water or immigration – all famil-
iar Type 2 issues – Bologna falls under what could be a separate Type 3 category
which is inextricably an ‘accountability project’ directed at the redesign of higher
education institutions. The accountability project analysed here is akin to what Kysar
(2004) calls ‘process based information’, that is, information about the condition
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

under which a product was produced rather than the product itself. As applied to these
new regimes, process based information represents the identification of the underly-
ing set of institutional practices through which an institution qualifies for certifica-
tion. Accountability communities provide a means through which this certification
for institution enables institutions to operate within new rescaled spaces of gover-
nance, to mobilise and link with other actors, and also to use this certification strate-
gically to gain autonomy in order to marginalise or insulate themselves from other
regulatory mechanisms.
It is not so much the concepts of quality and quality institutions that are crucial
to the regulatory governance of education but the fact that control of epistemic
resources of accountability permits diverse state and non-state actors to deliberate
within the broad parameters set by the regulatory regime. It is these networks –
rather than quality institutions – that form the accountability community. However,
these epistemic resources are valuable not in themselves, as would be the case of
say, scientific expertise, but in their role in helping to legitimate regulatory
governance. As Nagel’s analysis of Bologna policy networks astutely points out:
‘knowledge is rather a source of legitimation than of operational innovation: it is the
nimbus of science and not expertise itself, which becomes a political resource’
(Nagel 2007, 15). The resources of legitimacy are themselves clothed in the garb of
quality and accountability.
This has broader implications as notions of ‘quality’ have come to play an impor-
tant role in the design of knowledge economies and the regulation of knowledge
institutions. These accountability communities can just as easily form around private
agents and organisations when they control and disseminate various indicators that
rank the performance of educational institutions. This legitimacy has two distinct
features. One is that accountability communities become detached from territorially
specific jurisdictions, and incorporated into the functional regulatory regimes. This
occurs at the expense of more traditional lines of accountability through representa-
tive institutions, bureaucratic institutions, professional expertise or judicial review,
operating within territorially specific jurisdictions while the participation of govern-
mental and non-governmental agencies increases.5 The other feature is that the nature
and purpose of these measurements as ways of enhancing the competitiveness of the
economy or individual institutions remain beyond contention within these account-
ability communities while the measurement of quality itself becomes a subject for
contention.
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 13

New modes of regional governance and the transformation of the

public university
In terms of the argument of this essay, innovative modes of governance associated
with the regulation of European higher education entail a specific organisation of poli-
tics as well as an ideological construction of public goods. Hence the nature of the
‘public goods’ as well as the constitution of the public domain remain crucial to
sustaining legitimacy and creating new forms of political rule within these new decen-
tralised modes of higher education governance. As such, the crucial problem posed
here is not the type of multilevel governance per se but the way in which public power
and authority are constituted through accountability communities within these func-
tionally specific jurisdictions. Accountability communities provide the mechanisms of
legitimacy in these functionally specific regional regulatory regimes. Membership of
such regimes leads to forms of politics very different from those in general purpose
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

territorial-based Type 1 multilevel governance where membership depends on the

mobilisation of national citizenship. In the regulation of higher education, member-
ship of the regulatory regime is now located squarely within the new spaces of knowl-
edge economy that depend on the mobilisation of a notion of public good more
attuned to ideas of economic competitiveness and mobility.
Nevertheless the notion of higher education as providing a ‘public’ good resonates
within the Bologna Declaration, which explicitly directs its regulatory tools towards
reshaping European higher education in terms of public universities. Yet this notion
of the ‘public’ and public authority is now partly determined within this functionally
specific regulatory regime. Viewed from this perspective it is not difficult to see why
the Bologna Process attaches great importance to ideas and practices of accountabil-
ity. But crucial to our argument is that accountability is not merely a neutral or
technical procedure, but a fundamentally political process that determines who gets to
participate on what terms in these accountability communities. In this sense, as
Swyngedouw (2005) notes: ‘up-scaling or down-scaling is not socially neutral as new
actors emerge and consolidate their position in the process, while others are excluded
or become more marginal’ (p. 2001). Accountability is a political process that
reframes what constitutes the boundaries of citizenship within systems of higher
education.
Consequently, we need to examine the broader system of political rule by probing
closely the emergence, consolidation and contestation of ‘publicness’, i.e., the notion
of being ‘public’ within higher education regulatory regimes. Accountability commu-
nities help to establish a ‘public domain’, the nature and boundaries of which are
determined by the substantive goals and objectives, such as the principle of mobility
within the Bologna Process of the regulatory regimes (Vassiliki 2006). These
accountability communities become a focus of concerted political action through
which new boundaries and definition of ‘publicness’ are asserted, contested and regu-
lated (Newman 2006). If we accept this argument about the contested nature of
publicness we need to critically investigate the oft-made assumption that the ‘public’
dimension of what we understand as a ‘public university’ is implicitly linked to a
notion of national citizenship. In contrast, the process of regionalisation of higher
education leads to the construction of political and ideological boundaries of ‘public-
ness’. In essence the rescaling of higher education entailed by the Bologna Process
has important implications for how we define the nature and purpose of the ‘public
university’.
 14 K. Jayasuriya

In approaching these issues it is useful to consider the provocative analysis of

welfare politics in the European Union by Ferrera (2005), whose work brings a new
perspective to understanding these thorny issues by drawing attention to the often
forgotten political significance of the welfare state in consolidating a national territo-
rial form of state-building. Building on the work of Rokkan (1975), Ferrera attempts
to locate welfare politics in terms of the processes of building the boundaries of the
state. On this basis Ferrara seeks to develop a ‘spatial architecture’ of welfare (Ferrera
2005, 210), by arguing that social insurance systems developed within the bounded
spaces where membership and scope were the objects and instruments of the politics
of boundary structuring. This enables him to explain a great deal of comparative
welfare state differences in terms of this structuring perspective. The thrust of his
argument is that European integration means new structures and rules for ‘exit and
voice’ that fundamentally reshape the national boundaries and weaken obligations of
national citizenship.
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

This idea of citizenship-building as a boundary-shaping process gives us some

important insights into the changing nature of the idea of a ‘public university’. An
example is the case of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), the key cornerstone of
India’s current attempts at developing the knowledge economy. The IIT was initially
designed by Nehru as part of his strategy to develop and modernise the Indian econ-
omy. As such, the development of the IIT was intimately linked with what Desai
(2008) aptly describes as the developmental nation of the Nehru era. This develop-
mental nationalism attempts to:

… construct political economies of development by promoting productivity and relative

equality, although accomplishment varied among the resulting capitalist developmental
or communist states. (Desai 2008, 399)

On this basis developmental nationalism represented a process of state-building

through programs to establish forms of developmental citizenship. These citizenship
projects were in turn linked to a particular project of political economy. It is here that
the Indian experience with IITs as public institutions formed a part of a political
project to develop national citizenship in postcolonial India. With the transformation
of the global political economy and India’s growth strategy in the 1990s the role of
the IIT has been transformed. The Indian IIT project now plays an important role in a
broader state project that aims to build a ‘knowledge economy’ and produce globally
competitive citizens. The nature and character of public universities are the effects and
instruments of various projects of citizenship building.
Equally pertinent in discussions of public universities is the constant invocation to
the classical ideal of the ‘idea of the university’, adumbrated by Cardinal Newman last
century. This much-cited higher education philosophy finds expression in the early
work of people such as Newman and Humboldt. Newman, for example, argued that:

… a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims
at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the
national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popu-
lar aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating
the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. (Newman
1976, 154)

Newman’s essay has become a standard reference for those wishing to discuss the
nature and purpose of university education. Similarly, Humboldt, writing in a different
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 15

context attuned to the political economy of industrial Germany, espoused a notion of

the public university that combined industrial and civic elements (Jayasuriya, L.
2006).
These variegated ideas of the nature and form of the public university are the fabric
on which are sewn diverse state projects of citizenship-building. In the case of those
ideas of the public university associated with the likes of Newman and Humboldt,
the narratives of the purpose and function of universities are associated with the
development of a form of civic citizenship. In other words, these narratives have
helped to shape a particular conception not only of the university but of the ‘public’.
In the post-war period these notions of the ‘public’ have been expanded to include
social citizenship as a result of the continuing debates over participation in, and equal-
ity of access to, the benefits of higher education. The impact of the notions of social
citizenship is apparent. But crucial to our argument here is that these notions of social
citizenship reinforce a spatial architecture of citizenship. In short, it becomes a project
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

of citizenship-building that helps to provide a relational setting which shapes the

public character of the university. These various examples of ‘the idea of a university’
and its relationship to citizenship highlight the importance of a ‘structuring perspec-
tive’ in determining the membership, scope and meaning of the term of ‘public’ within
the higher education system. But it should be mentioned that this ‘boundary control’
carries with it an implicit methodological nationalism that naturalises a nationally
delineated construction of public good. The work of Ferrera (2005) and others seem
to portray an anxiety that the new European social policy – and the same logic would
apply to the Bologna Process – lacks the binding citizenship obligations of national
social systems.
Yet the notions of the ‘public university’ remain central in the new regulatory
order. While the concerns over the lack of a redistributive agenda are well taken, it
does not necessarily follow that these new functional regulatory regimes are devoid of
notions of publicness. Indeed, the Bologna initiative and related efforts to make
knowledge institutions a part of the political projects of a knowledge economy are
distinguished by an emphasis on the transformation of the public university. This
highlights the need to rethink the nature and meaning of membership in these
functionally-specific regulatory regimes.
Here, accountability communities play a crucial role in giving expression to the
‘public’ within the various modes of governance, and making those who exercise
public authority accountable in facilitating the application of public authority – if not
public law itself. At the same time, these new mechanisms of ‘accountable gover-
nance’ are about establishing systems of political rule through which new political
relationships are constituted. One of the defining characteristics of this extension of
public law norms and principles to the new modes of governance is that accountability
remains anchored to specific technical or instrumental goals of the European higher
education regulatory regime.
These goals lead to a conception of market citizenship in social and educational
governance in a manner consistent with ideas of a social Europe or what I have called
‘socialised neoliberalism’ (Jayasuriya 2006). This relates to the idea of ‘social inclu-
sion’ of all citizens within the economic mainstream through the incorporation into the
new knowledge economy. Social inclusion finds expression within the Bologna
Process via growing emphasis on mobility as a key objective of European higher
education policy. As Olds and Robertson (2008) underline in their global higher educa-
tion blog, ‘mobility’ is the fifth freedom of the European Union to go alongside the
 16 K. Jayasuriya

freedom of goods, services, capital and people. The European Competitiveness

Council also argues the case that in order to succeed in the transition to a highly
competitive knowledge economy, the European Union needs to create a ‘“fifth
freedom” – mobility – the free movement of knowledge. Member States and the
Commission are invited to widen their dialogue and expand their cooperation in order
to further identify and remove obstacles to the cross-border mobility of knowledge’
(European Competitiveness Council 2008, 6).
The very fact that ‘mobility’ is regarded as a ‘fifth freedom’ implies that these
new regulatory institutions – just as much as earlier invocations of the ideas of a
university – shape and create boundaries of citizenship or publicness. But in the case
of the European Union the boundaries and spaces are heterogenous so that the
mobility within the European higher education system is a freedom that applies to
migrants or asylum seekers. However, it needs to be reiterated that accountability
communities have a pivotal role in creating and sustaining new forms of publicness
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

in the functionally-specific regulatory regimes. They play a crucial role in control-

ling and shaping the boundaries of the public domain in the emerging European
higher education area just as much as the discourses of Newman and Humboldt in
higher education underpinned a particular idea of the public university as a form of
civic citizenship.

Accountability communities: linking Lisbon to Bologna

Accountability communities are central to the social production of the regional fron-
tier within the state. But at the same time they help to organise new systems of multi-
level governance. One of the central features of the new multilevel governance of
higher education is that it enables different national systems to retain elements of their
own regulatory architecture, but these would now operate within the constraints of a
system of meta-governance that monitors and enforces a broad set of benchmark stan-
dards. Therefore, European higher education initiatives are linked to the EU’s Lisbon
Agenda to promote a more competitive and knowledge-based European economy6. It
is clear that in the last two decades the creation of the knowledge economy has
become a central political project for a broad range of social forces and political
actors. In Europe, the Lisbon Agenda gave expression to this new agenda of compet-
itiveness. Given that knowledge and innovation are central to this agenda, the regula-
tion and coordination of European higher education become especially important. Of
particular significance in this competitiveness agenda is the capacity of the higher
education system to provide a mobile and skilled labour force in Europe. This involves
a meta-governmental role geared, ‘towards promoting states to compete with each
other in ways that promote rather than run counter to competitiveness on a global
scale’ (Cammack 2007, 17).
The effectiveness of accountability communities depends on how they are
anchored within specific state or transnational structures where even private
regulatory actors could dominate an accountability community (Jayasuriya 2008a).
Consequently the monitoring role performed by these communities is itself subject
to another level of governance: meta-governance or the governance of governance.
In this way these accountability communities perform a retail function for the
wholesale suppliers of the regulatory chain. For this reason alone, scholars and
policy-makers need to locate these communities within the supply chain of regula-
tory governance.
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 17

To fully appreciate the complexity of regulatory governance we need to under-

stand the ‘who and where’ of the wholesale end of governance. European higher
education policy such as the Bologna Process is intimately related to the European
Union’s Lisbon Agenda of creating a more competitive European Union (Keeling
2006; Robertson 2006). The European Commission, ‘consistently depicts learning as
an inherently productive activity, through which students accumulate and generate
knowledge for personal and social benefit’ (Keeling 2006, 209). However, even in the
initial Bologna Declaration it was clear that one of its foremost objectives was to
create a more competitive European higher education system. This move was strongly
influenced by efforts to create a knowledge-based economy which became the
centrepiece of state projects to develop human capital around the European Union.
While the Bologna agenda was initiated independent of the European Commission –
and is prior to the Lisbon Agenda – the Commission remains a key stakeholder and
participant in the process and, in this way, as Robertson argues, the Bologna Process
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

was grafted onto the Lisbon Agenda (Robertson 2006).

Grafting competitiveness into European higher education has two dimensions.
First was the effort to make the European higher education system competitive with
the US system, though this remained mainly implicit in the European higher education
policy statements and documents. Just as much as the single market project was driven
by a sense of European vulnerability to American and Japanese competition, the
project for European higher education was pushed along by a sense that European
higher institutions would fall behind the US (Zoontjens 2001). In this way one of the
interesting effects of the Bologna Process has been to facilitate the export of a
European regulatory model to other regions such as North America and Australia
(Robertson and Keeling 2008).
Second, the Bologna Process was designed to create a globally competitive
European Union. The core objective of the Lisbon Agenda, particularly after its
reformulation in 2005, was also to make the European economy a competitive,
knowledge-based economy within a socially cohesive and inclusive Union. The
European Employment Strategy (EES), an initiative of the Lisbon European Coun-
cil of 2000, was proposed as an effort to increase full-time employment levels
within the EU, and develop policies of social cohesion. The four main pillars of
the EES are: improving employability, developing entrepreneurship, promoting
adaptability and promoting equal opportunities and treatment for women at work.
The EES was explicitly linked to the development of a more competitive economy
within the EU, but it does this according to the specification of a meta-governmen-
tal process. The goals and objectives of the EES were effectively tied to the imple-
mentation of strategies of economic flexibility (Kok 2003). The crucial point here
is that the notion of employability adopted by the EES guidelines is designed to
increase the adaptability and adjustment of workers and economic institutions to a
more competitive global economy (Ballester 2005). Employability as a concept
was underpinned by a strong supply side-focus on issues of adjustment and flexi-
bility (Peck and Theodore 2000). These notions of flexibility also play a central
role in European higher education initiatives. In the Bologna Process there is
strong policy emphasis on the mobility of staff and students within the space of
higher education (Bologna Declaration 1999). The principal instruments through
which these objectives of mobility are to be achieved are: (a) a common three-tier
degree structure – bachelors, masters and doctoral; (b) the creation of a European
Credit Transfer System (ECTS) and the facilitating of common learning standards;
 18 K. Jayasuriya

(c) a diploma supplement to facilitate student transfer within the system; and (d)
the promotion of quality assurance and benchmarking systems to provide for
accreditation and constant monitoring of the governance of higher education
system (Sadlak 2007).
Ideas of mobility, central to the broader political projects of socialised neoliberal-
ism, are also evident in the normative driving force of the Bologna Process, and are
similar to the social inclusion agenda of the EU, namely a desire to enhance the
economic independence of individuals by equipping them with assets to compete in
the global economy. Knowledge institutions have become a central component of
developing human capital for the new knowledge economy. For this reason human
capital has become an important element of various political projects to socialise
neoliberalism – that is, to incorporate social objectives into market processes.7 One of
the driving assumptions of these projects is that the failure to enter the economic
mainstream, whether through lack of employment or income, reflects a lack of human
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

capital which is seen as an essential component in enhancing effective participation

and mobility within the economy.
Social inclusion demands that higher education policy be directed at developing
those capacities required for individuals to participate in the market economy. It is
these ideas that find expression in educational initiatives such as lifelong learning, that
is, the notion that rapid change in social and economic life requires flexibility, capacity
for and the pathways for access to continuous learning. This is an important idea that
finds expression in the Bologna Process but also encompasses ideas of social inclusion
and participation (Keeling 2006; Bennett and Ryley 2007). This implies a very differ-
ent understanding of social association based not in terms of class or social disadvan-
tage but on the degree to which individuals and groups possess those human capital
attributes necessary for functioning within the market economy. It is the operation of
accountability communities that gives expression to this socialised neoliberalism
(Jayasuriya 2006).
The link between the Lisbon and Bologna agendas works along three tracks by: (a)
producing more competitive individuals and societies; (b) enabling greater mobility of
staff and students essential for the creation of a knowledge-based economy; and (c)
placing emphasis on the monitoring of quality and standards through the meta-
governance of national institutions. In these regional regulatory agendas, economic
flexibility lies at the core of strategies of regulating regional governance (Cammack
2007). But this objective is secured in terms of the institutional regulation of the
conditions that enhance, rather than impede, mobility of knowledge.
However, these objectives are interpreted and implemented by accountability
communities who have a much enhanced role in the EU through the Lisbon Agenda.
This is because the new economic and social agenda of the EU brings with it a new
emphasis on ‘soft law’ or flexible governance to accommodate the diversity of
national economic and social governance. In this respect the operation of the OMC
allows a similar flexibility in the regulation of national higher education systems. It is
here that accountability communities play a crucial role as regulatory retailers in these
meta-governance systems. This is achieved by providing a forum for deliberation over
the means, instruments and scope of the incorporation of the Lisbon Agenda in the
Bologna Process through the creation of quality standards to enable the overarching
monitoring and supervision of individual quality standards organisation. In other
words, these ideas and practices of quality perform the grinding task of grafting the
Lisbon Agenda onto the Bologna Process.
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 19

Conclusion
Without doubt the institutions and governance of higher education have been substan-
tially transformed in the last decade in both developing and developed countries.
These transformations demonstrate:

… the intensifying interpenetration of the global and universal with the local and partic-
ular. The modern globalized knowledge system increasingly extends into the furthest
reaches of daily life, spreading universalized understandings of all aspects of nature and
every social institution worldwide. (Frank and Meyer 2007, 289)

Universities may indeed be global institutions but they remain enmeshed in forms
of regulatory governance located in sites beyond the national and formal bureaucratic
boundaries of the nation state.
The emerging European higher education system is indicative of a new architec-
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

ture of regulation that shapes the nature and form of the public university in the direc-
tion of market citizenship. In particular, the discourses and practices embedded in
accountability communities are the common thread that links the transforming forces
of marketisation, regulation and geographic scale (Jayasuriya 2008). In turn these
practices help to shape the nature and form of the ‘public’ to which account is to be
given. Accountability communities do not merely provide a set of technocratic menus;
they are vehicles of political governance that fundamentally shape the nature of public
authority and citizenship.
Accountability communities represent a significant component of new higher
education regulatory regimes that span the hard territorial boundaries of the national
state and serve to produce new regional scales of governance within the state. A key
mechanism through which these new scales of governance are produced is by consti-
tuting a public domain within these new regulatory regimes. For this reason notions
of accountability play a central role in the constitution of political governance of new
regimes of higher education. Ideas and practices of accountability are intimately
linked to the relocation of the public domain within functionally-specific regulatory
regimes. The regionalisation of public universities through such frameworks as the
Bologna Process helps to shape new regional frontiers within national political insti-
tutions. For this reason it is as much about the process of ‘state construction as it is
about destruction’ (Harrington and Turem 2006, 205). These new forms and sites
through which regulatory legitimacy is secured, consolidated, and contested help to
transform the public good served by the public university. Hence the public character
of the university does not disappear, but the nature of the ‘public’ that the university
serves is transformed by the new regulatory architecture of European higher educa-
tion. One of the implications of these new modes of regulatory regional governance is
that they tend to privilege certain actors, issues, and conflicts, over others. For this
reason, built into the logic of regulatory regionalism is a politics of scale that allows
political and economic actors to shift governance and activity to new scales of
governance in order to better reflect their strategic preferences. The forms of the new
regulatory institutions themselves favour certain forms of conflict, issues and actors
over others. The new spaces of higher education governance created by the Bologna
Process tend to favour market forms of citizenship over notions of social citizenship
that animated the post-war welfare state. The emphasis of the Bologna Process on
issues of quality and mobility tends to resonate with the Lisbon Agenda’s thrust
towards enhancing the global competitiveness of the EU. The production of these
 20 K. Jayasuriya

competitive knowledge spaces is inextricably linked to the constitution of new scales

of regional regulatory governance.

Notes
1. Geiger (2004) provides an excellent discussion of the relationship between knowledge and
markets in a North American context.
2. See for example Nóvoa (2002).
3. We borrow the term ‘publicness’ from the work of Newman (2007). This work has sought
to understand the reconstitution of the public domain in new strategies of welfare governance.
4. In our argument the sites and boundaries of the public domain are not fixed, but rather,
emerge from relational settings that are politically constructed in relational settings,
‘contested but patterned relations among narratives, people, and institutions’ (Somers
1994, 626). Hence we ask: What is the nature of the public good – and the public – in these
new regulatory modes of higher education governance?
5. Harrington and Turem (2006) explore the way in which new notions of liberal accountabil-
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

ity through negotiated rule-making and stakeholders work to marginalise institutions such
as judicial review.
6. For a full flavour of the arguments on the knowledge economy and the new growth theory
that have influenced the Lisbon Agenda, see OECD (1996).
7. This notion of ‘socialised neoliberalism’ is discussed in detail in Jayasuriya (2006).

Notes on contributor
Kanishka Jayasuriya is Professor of international politics at the University of Adelaide. His
most recent books are Reconstitution of the global liberal order (Routledge, 2005) and
Statecraft, welfare and the politics of social inclusion (Palgrave, 2006).

References
Adelman, C. 2008. Learning accountability from Bologna: A higher education policy primer
issues brief. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Higher Education Policy.
Ballester, R. 2005. European employment strategy and Spanish labour market policies. Work-
ing Paper 14, Department of Economics, University of Girona. http://www.recercat.net/
bitstream/2072/2228/1/n14.pdf.
Bennett, S., and P. Ryley. 2007. The Bologna Process and life long learning: Complexity
and flexibility as watchwords for change. Journal of Adult and Continuing Education
13, no. 2: 213–30.
Bologna Declaration. 1999. Joint declaration of the European Ministers of Education. http://
ec.europa.eu/education/policies/educ/bologna/bologna.pdf.
Cammack, P. 2007. Competitiveness and convergence: The open method of coordination in
Latin America. Papers in the Politics of Global Competitiveness No. 5 (March 17). http://
e-space.mmu.ac.uk/e-space/bitstream/2173/11064/1/omc.pdf.
Desai, R. 2008. Conclusion: From developmental nationalism to cultural nationalism. Third
World Quarterly 29, no. 3: 647–70.
European Association Quality Assurance (ENQA). 2007. Report to the London Conference
on a European Register of Quality Assurance. Occasional Paper 13. http://www.enqa.eu/
files/ENQA%20occasional%20papers%2013.pdf.
Ferrera, M. 2005. The boundaries of welfare: European integration and the new spatial poli-
tics of protection. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frank, D., and J. Meyer 2007. University expansion and the knowledge society. Theory and
Society 36, no. 4: 287–311.
Geiger, R. 2004. Knowledge and money: Research universities and the paradox of the market-
place. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Harrington, C., and Z. Turem. 2006. Accounting for accountability in neoliberal regulatory
regimes. In Public accountability: Designs, dilemma and experiences, ed. M. Dowdle,
195–219. New York: Cambridge University Press.
 Globalisation, Societies and Education 21

Hooghe, L., and G. Marks. 2003. Unravelling the central state, but how? Types of multi-level
governance. American Political Science Review 97, no. 2: 233–43.
Jayasuriya, K. 2006. Statecraft, welfare and the politics of social inclusion. Houndsmill,
Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Jayasuriya, K. 2008a. Riding the accountability wave: Accountability communities and
new modes of governance. In Administrative law and judicialized governance in Asia,
ed. T. Ginsburg and A. Chen, 59–78. London: Routledge.
Jayasuriya, K. 2008b. Regionalising the state: Political topography of regulatory regionalism.
Contemporary Politics 14, no. 1: 21.
Jayasuriya, K. 2008c. Retailing governance? The rise of accountability communities. Policy
Brief 2, June. http://wwwarc.murdoch.edu.au/wp/pb2.pdf.
Jayasuriya, L. 2006. The spirit of a civic university. New Critic. http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/
new-critic/two/civicuniversity.
Keeling, R. 2006. The Bologna Process and the Lisbon agenda: The European Commission’s
expanding role in higher education discourse. European Journal of Education 41, no. 2:
203–23.
King, R. 2006. Analysing the higher education regulatory state. Discussion Paper 36. Centre
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

for Risk and Regulation, London School of Economics. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/

CARR/pdf/DPs/Disspaper38.pdf.
Kok, W. 2003. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs: Creating more employment in Europe. European Commis-
sion. http://ec.europa.eu/growthandjobs/pdf/kok_report_en.pdf.
Kysar, D. 2004. Preferences for processes. Harvard Law Review 118, no. 2: 525–642.
Maassen, P., and J. Olsen. 2007. University dynamics and European integration. Dordrecht:
Springer.
Mok, K.H. 2008. Varieties of regulatory regimes in Asia: The liberalization of higher educa-
tion market and changing governance in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Pacific
Review 21, no. 2: 147–70.
Nagel, A. 2007. Network governance in European education policy – actors, relations and
perspectives in the Bologna Process. Paper presented at the conference, ‘Defining the
European Education Agenda’, January 11, in Cambridge, UK. Available from European
Education policy network at http://www.educationpolicy.eu (accessed August 23, 2009).
Newman, J.H. 1976. The idea of the university. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Newman, J. 2006. Restating a politics of the public. Soundings 32, Spring: 62–176.
Newman, J. 2007. Rethinking ‘the public’ in troubled times: Unsettling state, nation and the
liberal public sphere. Public Policy and Administration 22, no. 1: 27–47.
Nóvoa, A. 2002. Ways of thinking about education in Europe. In Fabricating Europe: The
formation of an education space, ed. A. Nóvoa and M. Lawn, 131–56. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic.
OECD. 1996. The knowledge based economy. Paris: OECD.
Olds, K., and K. Robertson. 2008. Mobility and knowledge as the ‘Fifth Freedom’ in Europe:
Embedding market liberalism? http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/fifth-
freedom-in-europe.
Peck, J., and N. Theodore. 2000. Beyond employability. Cambridge Journal of Economics 24,
no. 6: 729–49.
Robertson, S. 2006. The politics of constructing (a competitive) Europe(an) through interna-
tionalising higher education: Strategies, structures, subjects. Perspectives in Education 24,
no. 4: 29–44.
Robertson, S. 2007. Globalisation, rescaling of national education system and citizenship
regimes. In Changing notions of citizenship education in contemporary national states,
ed. K. Roth and N. Burbules, 136–50. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Robertson, S., and R. Dale. 2006. Changing geographies of power in education: The politics of
rescaling and its contradiction. In Education studies: Issues and critical perspectives, ed.
D. Kassem, E. Mufti, and J. Robinson, 221–32. Buckinghamshire: Open University Press.
Robertson, S., and R. Keeling. 2008. Stirring the lions: Strategies and tactics in global higher
education. Globalisation, Societies and Education 6, no. 3: 221–40.
Rokkan, S. 1975. Dimensions of state formation and nation building: A possible paradigm for
research on variations within Europe. In The formation of national states in western
Europe, ed. C. Tilly, 562–600. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.
 22 K. Jayasuriya

Sadlak, J. 2007. The Bologna Process, NJ: A regional response to global challenges. Paper
presented at the UNU/UNESCO International Conference on Globalization and Higher
Education, August 29–30, in Tokyo, Japan. http://www.unu.edu/globalization/2007/files/
UNU-UNESCO_Sadlak.pdf.
Somers, M. 1994. The narrative constitution of identity: A relational and network approach.
Theory and Society 23, no. 5: 605–49.
Sultana, R. 2002. Quality education and training for tomorrow’s Europe: A contrapuntal read-
ing of European Commission documents. In Fabricating Europe: The formation of an
education space, ed. A. Nóvoa, and M. Lawn, 109–30. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Swyngedouw, E. 2005. Governance innovation and the citizen: The Janus face of governance-
beyond-the-state. Urban Studies 42, no. 11: 1991–2006.
Vassiliki, P. 2006. Making higher education more European through student mobility?
Revising EU initiatives in the context of the Bologna Process. Comparative Education 42,
no. 1: 93–111.
Veiga, A., and A. Alberto. 2006. The open method of coordination and the implementation of
the Bologna Process. Tertiary Education and Management 12, no. 4, 283–95.
Zoontjens, P. 2001. Higher education in European space: Companies in a State context.
Downloaded by [University of Bristol] at 07:29 04 March 2016

European Journal of Education, Law and Policy 5, no. 1: 165–8.