The Power of the Purse: Supranational Entrepreneurship, Financial Incentives, and European Higher Education Policy

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Batory, Agnes; Lindstrom, Nicole
• 署名单位: Central European University; University of York - UK
• 刊物名称: GOVERNANCE-AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POLICY ADMINISTRATION AND INSTITUTIONS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0952-1895
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2011.01525.x
• 发表日期: 2011
• 关键词: coordination; governance; countries; UNION

摘要

This article shows how the European Commission cultivates policy shifts toward a particular idea of a common European Higher Education Area by using its considerable financial leverage. By making European Union (EU) funding dependent on grant recipients meeting certain strategically selected conditions, the Commission creates new incentive structures for domestic actors, in this case higher education institutions (HEIs), with two important consequences. First, the Commission turns universities into agents for its policies: Universities lobby governments to pass legislation, which would allow them to conform to Commission requirements. Second, HEIs try to comply with the Commission's requirements even in the absence of compatible national frameworks, thereby leapfrogging policy decisions on the national level. Describing this as a soft mechanism for achieving convergence, as Open Method of Coordination accounts posit, overlooks the fundamentally non-negotiable nature of the process from the participants' perspective and considerably underestimates the Commission's real influence. We examine this argument through a case study of an EU-funded higher education program, Erasmus Mundus.