Journal Articles

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

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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.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Governance

Call Number

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Publisher

Hoboken, United States : Wiley-Blackwell., 2011

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

09521895

Classification

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Content Type

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Media Type

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Carrier Type

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Edition

Volume 24, Issue 2, April 2011, pages 311–329

Subject(s)

Financial incentives
The power of the purse
Supranational Entrepreneurship
European Higher Education Policy

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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