From reflexive learning to reflective practice: universities as actors in multi-level transnational peer learning

This paper explores the variety of ways in which institutionalised settings of transnational peer learning in European higher education condition multi-level policy learning. Based on the comparison of three sites of facilitated transnational peer learning in the field of quality assurance, discursive and material enablers for reflexive and epistemic learning are reconstructed along the analytical dimensions of problematisation, role framing and the internal ambiguities of knowledge production and utilisation. On the one hand, transnational peer learning practices contribute to the social and political certification of universities and their organisations as epistemic actors. At the same time, reflective practice (self-reflection, self-analysis and self-assessment) emerges as a pragmatic logic of peer learning across the three cases, which implies a unique combination of organisational capacity-building and political agency-building. The paper contributes to the conceptualisation of transnational peer learning as an “emergent venue” of experimentalist governance.