New rules of the game? Reflections on governance, management and system change

The question of how to steer higher education systems and their institutions has been arecurrent theme in the higher education policy debate over the last forty years. A debatethat has been fueled by a number of interrelated developments. Our systems havegone through a period of substantive expansion, transforming them from elite to masssystems. Both in terms of numbers of enrolled students and in terms of numbers of institutions,today’s higher education systems bear little resemblance to those found inthe late 1960s. This massification has led not only to a reconsideration of fundingissues – funding mass systems on the same level and basis as elite systems simplytakes up too much of the national budget, as many governments have found out overthe years – it also has brought the issue of steering and control explicitly on to the table.In principle, one can imagine a relatively concise and homogeneous system beingdirected by a national ministry according to a uniform set of rules and regulations, astraditionally has been the case in many continental systems in Europe (e.g., Neave,2002). But a whole new situation arises when these systems expand and subsequentlydiversify in terms of student bodies, functions and orientations (Meek et al., 1996).Systems of an unprecedented complexity emerge that are at odds with uniform andcentral steering and control. It is simply no longer viable to ‘run’ a system from onenational control centre, as again many of our European governments have discovered –sometimes to their shock and horror, sometimes to their relief. And increasingly, it isnot only the government-institutional nexus that drives our higher education systems.A wide range of interest groups make claims on higher education, a new situation oftendescribed as the rise of the stakeholder society (see: Enders, 2002; Neave, 2002; vander Wende, 2002).