National and international strategic partnerships in European higher education (HE) have become a growing phenomenon (Engel et al., 2015), as recognized in university-industry relations (Poyago-Theotoky, Beath & Siegel, 2002; Frolund & Riedel, 2018), branch campuses (Shams & Huisman, 2011; Wilkins & Huisman, 2012; Kosmützky, 2018), or inter-university projects to enhance cooperation and collaboration in teaching and research production (Marques, Zapp & Powell, 2020; Fumasoli & Rossi, 2021). The European Union policy initiatives under the European Higher Education Area certainly contributed to such a development within Europe. However, while HE scholarship has studied national and international strategic partnerships, less attention has been paid to transnational ones. The latter refers to strategic partnerships that surpass and cut across national and single-organizational boundaries (despite their capacity to impact local and national levels) to build transnational structures (Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006). The European Universities Initiative (EUI), created by the European Commission in 2017, is a recent novel phenomenon within the European Union policy toolkit with an explicit transnational dimension for European HE. Thus, it aims at strengthening transnational strategic partnerships in European HE through the establishment of several European Universities by 2024. The policy initiative intends to achieve this ambition through the creation of bottom‐up networks of universities that will enable students to obtain combined degrees in several EU countries, foster research collaboration, and enhance the competitiveness of European universities (European Council, 2017). To date, the EUI counts 41 European university alliances, involving a total of 280 HE institutions (HEI) (European Commission, 2020). Following the rationale of the panel proposal, we argue that the EUI, as a new transnational governance mechanism, can be seen as a significant structural reform for European HE whose impacts are yet to be explored. Given its recent design and implementation, the paper charts the institutional features of the EUI aimed at fostering transnational strategic partnerships within European HE. We thus address the following question: what are the main regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive institutional dimensions of the EUI as a new transnational governance mechanism?
Theoretically, the paper is anchored in new institutionalism and applies the three institutional dimensions (related to rules, standards, and ideas respectively) (Scott, 2008) to analyze the EUI as a transnational governance mechanism (Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006) both at the European policy level and at the organizational level. Methodologically, the paper is supported by a qualitative approach. At the European policy level, we analyze semi-structured interviews with European policy-makers and the EUI’s official policy documents. At the organizational level, we analyze the strategic documents of the entire population of transnational strategic partnerships (n=41) supported by the EUI. Our neo-institutionalist analysis finds that at the European policy level, the EUI appears as a ‘next level of cooperation’ in European HE, since these transnational strategic partnerships have a long-term vision, whose aim is to transform cooperation between universities that becomes systematically structural. At the organizational level, the results point to a variety of forms in which strategic partnerships govern transnational organizational structures, shape university missions, and redefine European HE.
