Higher Education has been a fruitful terrain for experimental governance in Europe. Nevertheless this section of named “Higher Education section: research, policy and integration” offers contributions that go beyond Europe. Our interest is in studying theoretical, empirical and comparative contributions that analyse the effects that ideas, actors, policy instruments and institutions have had on the governance of HE as a nascent domain of European governance and/or integration process, the Bologna Process as a learning region for smart governance and the ‘right turn’ in the national higher education policies.

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has emerged via the creation of self-governing policy networks the existence of which relies extensively on learning-based instruments, such as benchmarking, good practice sharing and expert deliberation. This panel examines tools of stakeholder-driven policy co-ordination which prompt participants to engage in learning from each other, but also about their own roles and identities.

Policy coordination in higher education and research reflects European integration objectives and challenges in other policy domains, including those in which the EU has exclusive competence, given that knowledge has been exported to other policy domains as a policy solution. This panel will reflect how the knowledge domain has become a “crucial case” of European integration.

The panel examines the growth of European ideas circulating throughout the field of Latin American Higher Education (HE), as part of the Bologna Process, which has manifested itself in a set of procedures, methods and tools that have contributed to the transformation of Chilean and Mexican HE.